Class i . : _ 

Book - B( r 

mz - 



I 



NOTE. 

In compliance with repeated suggestions it has been decided to issue the present 
volume of the Library of Philosophy in a slightly smaller size than that adopted 
for the preceding volumes. Future editions of the latter and new volumes of the 
series will be uniform with this volume. 



Xibran? of pbUoeopb^ 

EDITED BY J. H. MUIRHEA D, M.A. 



THE LIBRARY OF PHILOSOPHY. 



The LIBRARY OF PHILOSOPHY is in the first in- 
stance a contribution to the History of Thought. While 
much has been done in England in tracing the course of evo- 
lution in nature, history, religion, and morality, comparatively 
little has been done in tracing the development of Thought 
upon these and kindred subjects, and yet " the evolution of 
opinion is part of the whole evolution." 

This Library will deal mainly with Modern Philosophy, 
partly because Ancient Philosophy has already had a fair share 
of attention in this country through the labours of Grote, 
Ferrier, and others, and more recently through translations 
from Zeller ; partly because the Library does not profess to 
give a complete history of thought. 

By the co-operation of different writers in carrying out this 
plan, it is hoped that a completeness and thoroughness of treat- 
ment otherwise unattainable will be secured. It is believed, 
also, that from writers mainly English and American fuller 
consideration of English Philosophy than it has hitherto re- 
ceived from the great German Histories of Philosophy may 
be looked for. In the departments of Ethics, Economics, and 
Politics, for instance, the contributions of English writers to 
the common stock of theoretic discussion have been especially 
valuable, and these subjects will accordingly have special pro- 
minence in this undertaking. 

Another feature in the plan of the Library is its arrange- 
ment according to subjects rather than authors and dates, 
enabling the writers to follow out and exhibit in a way 
hitherto unattempted the results of the logical development of 
particular lines of thought. 

The historical portion of the Library is divided into two 
sections, of which the first contains works upon the develop- ( 
ment of particular schools of Philosophy, while the second ex- 
hibits the history of theory in particular departments. The 
third series contains original contributions to Philosophy, and j 
the fourth translations of valuable foreign works. 

To these have been added, by way of Introduction to the 
whole Library, (i) an English translation of Erdmann's " His- 
tory of Philosophy," long since recognised in Germany as the 
best; (2) translations of standard foreign works upon Philosophy. 

J. H. MUIRHEAD, 

General Editor. 



ALREADY PUBLISHED. 

The History of Philosophy. By Dr. Johann Eduard Erdmann. 

English Translation. Edited by WlLLiSTON S. Hough, M.Ph., Professor of 
Mental and Moral Philosophy and Logic in the University of Minnesota. 

In 3 vols., medium 8vo, cloth. 
Vol. I. Ancient and Mediaeval Philosophy, \^s. . . . Second Edition. 

Vol. II. Modern Philosophy, 15^ Third Edition. 

Vol. III. Modern Philosophy since Hegel, 12s. . . Third Edition. 

The History of ^Esthetic. By Bernard Bosanquet, M.A., LL.D., late Fellow of 
University College, Oxford. [Second Series. 

The Development of Rational Theology since Kant. By Professor Otto 
Pfleiderer, of Berlin. [Second Series. 



LIST OF WORKS IN PREPARATION. 

FLRST SERIES. 

Early Idealism : Descartes to Leibnitz. By W. L. Courtney, M.A., LL.D. (St. 

Andrews), Fellow of New College, Oxford. 
German Idealists: Kant to Hegel. By Wm. Wallace, M.A., VVhyte Professor of 

Moral Philosophy, University of Oxford. 
Modern Realists : Leibnitz, Herbart, Lotze. By Andrew Seth, M.A., Professor of 

Logic and English Literature, University of Edinburgh. 
Sensationalists: Locke to Mill. By W. S. Hough, M.Ph., Professor of Mental and 

Moral Philosophy, University of Minnesota, U.S.A. 
The Ethics of Idealism: Kant and Hegel. By Henry JoNes, M.A., Professor of 

Mental and Moral Philosophy, University of St. Andrews. 
The Utilitarians : Hume to Contemporary Writers. By W. R. Sorley, M.A., Fellow 

of Trinity College, Cambridge, and Professor of Philosophy in University College, Cardiff. 
Principle of Evolution in its Scientific and Philosophical Aspects. By John 

Watson, LL.D., Professor of Moral Philosophy, University of Queen's College, 

Kingston, Canada. 

SECOND SERIES. 

The History of Psychology: Empirical and Rational. By Robert Adamson, M.A., 
LL.D., Professor of Logic and Political Economy, Owen's College, Manchester. 

The History of Political Philosophy. By D. G.Ritchie, M.A., Fellow of Jesus 
College, Oxford. 

Philosophy and Economics in their Historical Relations. By J. Bonar, 
M.A., LL.D. 

The History of the Philosophical Tendencies of the Nineteenth Century. 
By Josiah Royce, Professor of Philosophy, Harvard University. 

i THIRD SERIES. 

'First Principles of Philosophy. By John Stuart Mackenzie, M.A. , Fellow of 
Trinity College, Cambridge, Assistant Lecturer on Philosophy, Owen's College, Man- 
chester. 

The_ Theory of Ethics. By Edward Caird, LL.D., Professor of Moral Philosophy 
in the University of Glasgow. 

Epistemology ; or, The Theory of Knowledge. By James Ward, D.Sc, LL.D., 
Fellow and Lecturer of Trinity College, Cambridge. 

Principles of Psychology. By G. F. Stout, M.A., Fellow of St. John's College, 
Cambridge. \_Shortly. 

Principles of Instrumental Logic. By John Dewey, Ph.D., Professor of Philo- 
sophy in the University of Michigan. 

FOURTH SERIES. 

Sig wart's Logic. Translated by Helen Dendy. 2 vols. 



SWAN SONNENSCHEIN & Co., LONDON. 
MACMILLAN & Co., NEW YORK. 



ERDMANN'S HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY. 



NOTICES OF THE PRESS. 

"A splendid monument of patient labour, critical acumen, and admirable 
methodical treatment. . . . It is not too much to predict that, for the library 
of the savant, for the academical student, whose business it is to be primed in 
the wisdom of the ages, and for the literary dilettante, who is nothing if not well 
up in 'things that everybody ought to know,' these volumes will at once become a 
necessity for purposes, at least, of reference, if not of actual study. . . . We 
possess nothing that can bear any comparison with it in point of completeness." — 
Pall Mall Gazette. 

" It is not necessary to speak of the great merits of Erdmann's History of 
Philosophy. Its remarkable clearness and comprehensiveness are well known. 
. . . The translation is a good, faithful rendering, and in some parts even 
reaches a high literary level." — Professor John Watson, in The Week, of Canada. 

" It is matter of real congratulation, in the dearth still of original English or 
American work over the whole field of historical philosophy, that by the side of the 
one important German compend of this generation, the other, so well fitted to serve 
as its complement, is now made accessible to the English-speaking student." — 
Mind. 

" It has been long known, highly esteemed, and in its successive editions has 
sought to make itself more worthy of the success it has justly achieved. Erd- 
mann's work is excellent. His history of mediaeval philosophy especially deserves 
attention and praise for its comparative fulness and its admirable scholarship. 
. . . It must prove a valuable and much-needed addition to our philosophical 
works." — Scotsman, 

" The combination of qualities necessary to produce a work of the scope and 
grade of Erdmann's is rare. Industry, accuracy, and a fair degree of philosophic 
understanding may give us a work like Ueberweg's ; but Erdmann's history, while 
in no way superseding Ueberweg's as a hand book for general use, yet occupies a 
different position. Erdmann wrote his book, not as a reference book, to give in 
brief compass a digest of the writings of various authors, but as a genuine history 
of philosophy, tracing in a genetic way the development of thought in its treat- 
ment of philosophic problems. Its purpose is to develop philosophic intelligence 
rather than to furnish information. When we add that, to the successful execution 
of this intention, Erdmann unites a minute and exhaustive knowledge of philo- 
sophic sources at first hand, equalled over the entire field of philosophy probably 
by no other one man, we are in a condition to form some idea of the value of the 
book. To the student who wishes, not simply a general idea of the course of 
philosophy, nor a summary of what this and that man has said, but a somewhat 
detailed knowledge of the evolution of thought, and of what this and the other 
writer have contributed to it, Erdmann is indispensable ; there is no substitute." — 
Professor John Dewey, in The Andover Review. 

" It is a work that is at once compact enough for the ordinary student, and full 
enough for the reader of literature. ... At once systematic and interesting." — 
Journal of Education. 

"The translation into English of Erdmann's History of Philosophy is an 
important event in itself, and in the fact that it is the first instalment of an under- 
taking of great significance for the study of philosophy in this country. Apart, 
however, from its relation to the Library to which it is to serve as an introduction, 
the translation of Erdmann's History of Philosophy is something for which the 
English student ought to be thankful. ... A History of past endeavours, 
achievements, and failures cannot but be of great use to the student. Such a His- 
tory, able, competent, trustworthy, we have now in our hands, adequately and 
worthily rendered into our mother-tongue." — Spectator. 

vi 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC 



A 

HISTORY OF ESTHETIC 



BY 

BERNARD BOSANQUET, M.A. (Oxon.) 
Hon. LL.D. (Glasgow) 

Formerly Fellow of University College, Oxford 




LONDON : 

SWAN SONNENSCHEIN & CO. 

NEW YORK: MACMILLAN & CO. 
1892 



Butler & Tanner, 
The Selwood Printing Works, 
Frome, and London. 



ilC? lip 



PREFACE. 



^ESTHETIC theory is a branch of philosophy, and exists for the sake 
of knowledge and not as a guide to practice. The present work is,, 
therefore, primarily addressed to those who may find a philosophical 
interest in understanding the place and value of beauty in the system 
of human life, as conceived by leading thinkers in different periods 
of the world's history. It is important to insist that the aesthetic 
philosopher does not commit the impertinence of invading the artist's 
domain with an apparatus belli of critical principles and precepts. 
The opinion that this is so draws upon aesthetic much obloquy, which 
would be fully deserved if the opinion were true. Art, we are told, 
is useless ; in a kindred sense aesthetic may well submit to be useless 
also. The aesthetic theorist, in short, desires to understand the artist, 
not in order to interfere with thp latter, but in order to satisfy an 
intellectual interest of his own. . - t : 

But besides professed students of philosophy, there is a large and 
increasing public of readers who are genuinely attracted by a fairly 
clear and connected exposition of any philosophical science the subject- 
matter of which comes home to them, be it Logic or Ethic, Sociology, 
or the theory of Religion. Such readers are approaching philosophy 
through the subject-matter that already interests them, instead of 
approaching the particular subject-matter simply because it is an 
integral part of philosophy. I confess to cherishing a hope that in 
spite of the defects which deprive this book of the charm that a more 
skilful writer might have given to such a subject, many intelligent 
lovers of beauty will be glad to make acquaintance, through it, with 
the thoughts of great men upon this important element of the spiritual 
world. 

I have regarded my task, however, as the history of aesthetic, and 
not as the history of aestheticians. I have not paid much attention 
to the claims of historical justice. While I feel sure that no writer 
of the first rank is omitted, I could not venture to say that all the 



PREFACE. 



writers included are more important than any that are excluded. I 
have thought first of the arrangement necessary or convenient in order 
to exhibit the affiliation of ideas, and their completest forms, and only 
in the second place of the individual rank and merit of the writers to 
be dealt with. 

Moreover, as the first chapter will show, I have not been able to 
persuade myself to treat my subject as a mere account of speculative 
theory. No branch of the history of philosophy can be adequately 
treated in this way, and the history of aesthetic least of all. My aim 
has therefore been to exhibit philosophic opinion as only the clear and 
crystallized form of the aesthetic consciousness or sense of beauty, 
which is itself determined by conditions that lie deep in the life of 
successive ages. I have desired, in fact, so far as possible, to write the 
history of the aesthetic consciousness. 

Many readers may complain of the almost total absence of direct 
reference to Oriental art, whether in the ancient world or in modern 
China and Japan. For this omission there were several connected 
reasons. I was hardly called upon, even if I had been competent 
for the task, to deal with an aesthetic consciousness which had not, 
to my knowledge, reached the point of being clarified into speculative 
theory. It was, moreover,, necessary to limit my subject in some 
definite way; and it seemed natural to exclude everything that did 
not bear on the continuous development of the European art-con- 
sciousness. In so far as contact with Oriental art influenced the early 
Greek, and again the Byzantine development, a reference to it is im- 
plied in Hegel's and Morris' treatment of those periods. And finally, 
this omission is not without a positive ground, though here I really 
touch on a matter which is beyond my competence. The separation 
from the life of the progressive races, and the absence of a reflective 
theory of beauty, must surely have a fundamental connection with 
the non-architectural character pointed out by Mr. Morris in the art 
of China and Japan (p. 456). Without denying its beauty, therefore, 
I regarded it as something apart, and not well capable of being brought 
into the same connected story with the European feeling for the 
beautiful. A study of such art from a competent hand, in the light 
of aesthetic theory, would be a welcome aid to modern speculation. 

With reference to my use of authorities, while there is often more 
egotism than modesty in calling the public to witness the course of 
an author's reading, I feel absolutely bound in this case to warn my 
readers that the reliability of the different parts of my work is unequal. 
For the mediaeval period between Plotinus and Dante, and in a lesser 



PREFACE. 



XHl 



degree for the Hellenistic period between Aristotle and Plotinus, my 
knowledge is not, for the most part, at first hand, and represents a 
voyage of discovery rather than a journey on ground familiar to me. 
I have not for these periods been able to follow the scholar's golden 
rule — never to quote from a book that he has not read from cover to 
cover. I have drawn my quotations from works of reference, and 
though I have, as a rule, carefully verified them and endeavoured to 
judge of the context, my estimate of the writer's position usually rests 
on the authority, in many cases Erdmann's History of Philosophy and 
the articles in the Encyclopedia Britannica, which I have consulted for 
information. In the case of Thomas Aquinas in particular, I pro- 
fess no original knowledge at all. The very full quotations most 
courteously furnished me by Dr. Gildea appeared too significant to 
be left unused, and his authority warranted me in supposing that in 
these passages the principal materials for forming a judgment were 
before me. I do not desire it to be understood that he agrees with 
me in the estimate which I have formed of St. Thomas's aesthetic 
views. 

It would have been foolish, I thought, to omit the more obvious 
points of the mediaeval development, both in art and in opinion, the 
mere mention of which might be suggestive to my readers, simply 
because I had to take them from such writers as Prof. Adamson, 
Prof. Seth, Prof. Middleton, Mr. Morris and Mr. Pater, and not 
from original research. Some division of labour must be allowed, 
though the fact that it has been resorted to should always be made 
known. 

Acknowledgments for assistance are due from me above all to 
Prof. A. C. Bradley, who not only furnished me with a list of books 
which has been of the utmost service, but lent me out of his own 
library many of those works, which I might otherwise have had a 
difficulty in procuring. I also owe the most cordial thanks to Mr. 
J. D. Rogers, for permitting me to embody in an Appendix his 
analyses of some instances of musical expression — models, as I 
think, of what such analyses should be — and to Dr. Gildea, for the 
information mentioned above. And, finally, it is only right to say, 
that it is on the Council of the Home Arts and Industries Associa- 
tion, and in contact with its workers, that I have learned to appre- 
ciate, as I hope, with some degree of justice the writings of Mr. 
Ruskin and Mr. Morris, which may easily remain a sealed book to 
those who have not observed in simple cases the relation of work- 
manship to life. Many readers, who are familiar with the average 



XIV 



PREFACE. 



work of the classes of that Association, may think that it reveals 
no great mystery of beauty ; but I am convinced that the leaders of 
the Association have sound insight, and that experience, to an in- 
creasing extent, is justifying their principles. 

London, April, 1892. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 



Preface xi 

CHAPTER I. 

PAGE 

Proposed treatment, and its connection with the definition 
of Beauty. 

1. The History of ^Esthetic, and the History of Fine Art . . i 

2. The relation of Natural Beauty to the Beauty of Fine Art . 3 

3. The definition of Beauty, and its relation to the History of 

^Esthetic 4 

CHAPTER II. 

The creation of a poetic world, and its first encounter with 
reflection. 

1. Early Reflection hostile to Art . . . . . . 10 

2. Creation of the World of Beauty - . . . . .10 

3. Reason for the Attitude of Reflection 11 

4. Neglected Suggestion in the Idea of Imitation . . , .12 

5. Wide use of term " Imitation " in Ancient Philosophy . . 13 

6. Further Explanation how Greek Art could be called " Imitative " 13 

i. Facility of Imitative Art makes it Ideal . . . 13 

ii. Hellenic Art not so Abstractly Ideal as has been thought . 13 
7., The Ground prepared for ^Esthetic Theory . . . .15 

CHAPTER III. 

The fundamental outlines of Greek theory concerning the 
beautiful. 

The Principles and their Connexion . . . . .16 
1. The Moralistic Principle . . . . . . . 17 

a. How it shows itself .18 

/?. Its ^Esthetic Value 21 

XV 



xvi 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



PAGE 



2. The Metaphysical Principle . . . . . . 23 

a. How it shows itself . . . . . . 23 

ft. Its ^Esthetic Value 28 

i. Esthetic Semblance . . . . . .28 

ii. Semblance inadequate to Reality . . . -29 

3. The ^Esthetic Principle 30 

a. General statements in Ancient Writers . . . 32 
ft. Particular cases . . . . . . . . 34 

i. Colour and Tone ....... 34 

ii. Elementary Geometrical Forms . . . -35 

iii. Simple Song-music 36 

iv. Ethical and Logical Wholes 36 

v. The Lesser Arts and Formative Art ... 38 

vi. Poetry and the Drama . . . . . -39 

4. Illustration from Fechner, and Conclusion .... 40 



CHAPTER IV. 

Signs of progress in Greek theory concerning the beautiful. 



1. The three Antitheses ........ 43 

2. The Pre-Socratics . ' . . 43 

3. Socrates . . . . . . . . . . .44 

a. " Can the Invisible be imitated ? " . . . . -44 
ft. ^Esthetic and Real Interest ...... 45 

4. Pythagoreanism 46 

a. Symbolism . . . . . . . . .46 

ft. (omitted). 

y. Concrete Analysis ........ 46 

5- P^to . 47 

a. Symbolism 47 

ft. ^Esthetic Interest -5° 

y. Concrete Criticisms . 54 

6. Aristotle 55 

a. Symbolism 56 

i. Selection of Phenomena. . . . . .56 

ii. The Ugly ... . . . . . 57 

iii. Poetry Philosophic . • • • • 59 

iv. Musical Symbolism ...... 60 

v. Art corrective of Nature 61 

ft. ^Esthetic Interest . . 62 

i. Beauty, Virtue, and Pleasure . . . . .62 

ii. Educational Interest 63 



XVII 



PAGE 

iii. The Function of Tragedy ..... 64 

a. Materials from Aristotle ..... 64 

b. Estimate of his meaning . . ' . 66 
y. Concrete Criticism 68 

i. History and Elements of Drama .... 68 

ii. Plot and character-drawing . . . . 70 

CHAPTER V. 

Alexandrian and Greco-Roman culture to the reign of 
constantine the great. 

Character of the Period . -77 

1. General Philosophy and Art . . . . . . .81 

a. Philosophy 81 

fi. Poetry 86 

i. New and Latin Comedy . . . . .86 

ii. The Idyll . .87 

iii. The Anthology . 88 

iv. Roman Poets . . , . . . .88 
y. Formative Art and Architecture 93 

2. Reflective ^Esthetic . . . . . . . . 99 

i. Stoic . . . . . . . . . . 99 

ii. Epicurean . . . . ... . .100 

iii. Aristarchus and Zoilus . . . . . . .102 

iv. Later Greco-Roman Critics . . . . . .102 

v. Plotinus . . . . - . . . ' ' . . .111 

a. Symbolism . . . .- . . . .113 
/?. ^Esthetic Interest . - . . . . .114 
y. Concrete Criticism 115 

CHAPTER VI. 

Some traces of the continuity of the esthetic consciousness 
throughout the middle ages. 

Our Attitude to the Renaissance . . . . . .120 

1. Tendency to extend Renaissance back towards Christian Era . 120 

i. Pre-Raphaelite Painting . . . . . . .121 

ii. Thirteenth Century French Literature . . . .122 

iii. Abelard . -123 

iv. Architecture and Decoration back to Sixth Century . . 123 

v. Christian Art and Song of the Earliest Centuries . . 126 

vi. Necessity of an Interval of Austerity . . . .130 



XV111 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



PAGE 



2. Intellectual Continuity of ^Esthetic from Plotinus . . . 131 

i. From Emanation to Evolution . . . " • . -132 

ii. Dualism and Love of Nature . . . . . 133 

iii. Augustine on " Beauty of Universe " . . . . 133 

iv. Suppression of Paganism and Increasing Austerity . .136 

v. Significance of Iconoclasm . . . . . 137 

vi. The System of Scotus Erigena 139 

vii. Anticipation of End of World in 1000 a.d. . . . 143 

viii. The Modern Mind in St. Francis 144 

ix. The ^Esthetic Ideas of St. Thomas Aquinas . . . 146 



CHAPTER VII. 

A COMPARISON OF DANTE AND SHAKESPEARE IN RESPECT OF SOME 



FORMAL CHARACTERISTICS. 

1. Limits of the subject " . . 151 

2. The Selection of Artistic Form by the two Poets . . .152 

3. The Kind of Significance aimed at by each . . . .156 

4. The true Relations of the later Renaissance . . . .162 



CHAPTER VIII. 



The problem of modern esthetic philosophy. 

1. The Process of Preparation . . . . . .166 

2. The Prolonged Interruption of ^Esthetic . . . . .166 

3. Preparation of the Problem : Descartes to Baumgarten . .170 

i. The two Tendencies, " Universal " and " Individual " . 170 

ii. Distinguished from Ancient Philosophy . . . .171 

iii. From each other .' -173 

iv. Connexion with Mediaeval Dualism . . . . .174 

v. ^Esthetic Ideas in pre-Kantian Philosophy . . 175 

a. Leibnitz .177 

b. Shaftesbury . . . . . . . 177 

c. Hume . . . . . . . . 178 

d. Nature of the Advance . . . . .180 

e. Baumgarten . . . . .. ■ . ... 182 



\ 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



XIX 



CHAPTER IX. 

PAGE 

The data of modern aesthetic philosophy. 

Limits of the Subject . . . . . . . .188 

1. Classical Philology . . .188 

i. Joseph Scaliger . . . - . . . . 188 

ii. F. A. Wolff 189 

2. Archaeology . . • . . . • - • . • • I 9° 

i. Early Discoveries on Italian Soil . . . . .191 

ii. Early Travels in Greece . . . . . . .192 

iii. Herculaneum and Pompeii 192 

iv. Greece proper 193 

3. Art-criticism . . . ... . . . . 197 

i. Pierre Corneille 197 

ii. Fontenelle and Voltaire . . . . . . .201 

iii. The British Writers 202 

a. Burke and Lord Kaimes . . ... . 203 

a. Burke's Purgation Theory .... 203 

b. The Sublime akin to Ugliness .... 203 

c. Painful Reality not Disagreeable . . .204 

d. Anticipations of Later Ideas . . . -205 

p. Hogarth . .206 

y. Reynolds - . .209 

iv. Germans before Lessing . . . . . .210 

a. Gottsched . . . . . . .211 

p. The "Swiss" 214 

v. Lessing . . . . . . . . 216 

a. His Conception of Criticism . . . . .217 

p. Aim of the Laocoon 220 

7. Demarcation of " Painting " and Poetry . . . 223 

8. Lessing's Attitude towards the Problem of Ugliness . 225 
€. A point in which his Classicism was justified . . 229 
£. His Theory of the Drama . . . . .230 

vi. Winckelmann. His Characteristics 239 

a. Feeling for Art as Human Production . . . 240 

p. True sense of a History of Art .... 242 

7. Recognition of Phases in Beauty .... 244 

S. Conflict between Beauty and Expression . . . 248 

vii. Data not utilized by the Critics 251 

viii. Indications of a Transition 252 



xvni 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 







PAGE 


Intellectual Continuity of ^Esthetic from Plotinus 


• I 3 I 


i. 


From Emanation to Evolution .... 


• J 3 2 


ii. 


Dualism and Love of Nature 


00 


iii. 


Augustine on " Beauty of Universe "... 


• J 33 


iv. 


Suppression of Paganism and Increasing Austerity . 


• i3 6 


v. 


Significance of Iconoclasm . 


• 137 


vi. 


The System of Scotus Erigena .... 


• 139 


vii. 


Anticipation of End of World in iooo a.d. 


• 143 


viii. 


The Modern Mind in St. Francis .... 


. 144 


ix. 


The ^Esthetic Ideas of St. Thomas Aquinas 


. 146 



CHAPTER VII. 

A COMPARISON OF DANTE AND SHAKESPEARE IN RESPECT OF SOME 



FORMAL CHARACTERISTICS. 

1. Limits of the subject . . . . " . . 151 

2. The Selection of Artistic Form by the two Poets . . .152 

3. The Kind of Significance aimed at by each . . . .156 

4. The true Relations of the later Renaissance .... 162 



CHAPTER VIII. 



The problem of modern aesthetic philosophy. 

1. The Process of Preparation . . . . . .166 

2. The Prolonged Interruption of ^Esthetic 166 

3. Preparation of the Problem : Descartes to Baumgarten . .170 

i. The two Tendencies, " Universal " and " Individual , 170 

ii. Distinguished from Ancient Philosophy . . . -171 

iii. From each other . . . . . . .173 

iv. Connexion with Mediaeval Dualism . . . . .174 

v. ^Esthetic Ideas in pre-Kantian Philosophy . . 175 

a. Leibnitz . . . . . . . . .177 

b. Shaftesbury 177 

c. Hume . . . . . . . . 178 

d. Nature of the Advance . . . . . .180 

e. Baumgarten . . . . . . ... 182 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. XIX 



CHAPTER IX, 

PAGE 

The data of modern esthetic philosophy. 

Limits of the Subject . . . . . . . .188 

1. Classical Philology 188 

i. Joseph Scaliger . . . . . 188 

ii. F. A. Wolff 189 

2. Archaeology .. . * . . . . . . - • 190 

i. Early Discoveries on Italian Soil . . . . .191 

ii. Early Travels in Greece . . . . . . .192 

hi. Herculaneum and Pompeii 192 

iv. Greece proper . 193 

3. Art-criticism . . . ... . . . 197 

i. Pierre Corneille . . . . . . . 197 

ii. Fontenelle and Voltaire .201 

hi. The British Writers . . . . . ... 202 

a. Burke and Lord Kaimes . . ... -203 

a. Burke's Purgation Theory .... 203 

b. The Sublime akin to Ugliness . . . -203 

c. Painful Reality not Disagreeable . . .204 

d. Anticipations of Later Ideas . . . .205 

/?. Hogarth . .206 

y. Reynolds . . . . . . . 209 

iv. Germans before Lessing . . . . . . .210 

a. Gottsched . * . . . . . .211 

(3. The " Swiss " 214 

v. Lessing . . . . . . . . . .216 

a. His Conception of Criticism . . . . .217 

ft. Aim of the Laocoon 220 

y. Demarcation of " Painting " and Poetry . . .223 

8. Lessing's Attitude towards the Problem of Ugliness . 225 

e. A point in which his Classicism was justified . . 229 

£. His Theory of the Drama 230 

vi. Winckelmann. His Characteristics . . . . .239 

a. Feeling for Art as Human Production . . . 240 
True sense of a History of Art .... 242 
y. Recognition of Phases in Beauty .... 244 
3. Conflict between Beauty and Expression . . . 248 

vii. Data not utilized by the Critics 251 

viii. Indications of a Transition -252 



XX 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER X. 



Kant — The problem brought to a focus. 

1. His Relation to the Problem and the Data . . . . 255 

2. Place of the ^Esthetic Problem in his System . . . -256 

3. Why the ^Esthetic Judgment is the Answer to the Problem . 261 

i. Demarcation of ^Esthetic Consciousness .... 265 

ii. Positive Essence of ^Esthetic Consciousness . . .265 

iii. Its Subjectivity . . 266 

4. Conflict of Abstract and Concrete in Kant's ^Esthetic . . 267 

5. Range and Subdivision of Esthetic Perception . . -274 

i. Theory of Sublime . . . . . . . 275 

ii. Classification of Arts . . . . . . .279 

6. Conclusion . . . . . ... . .280 



CHAPTER XL 

The first steps of a concrete synthesis — Schiller and 



Goethe. 

I. Schiller 286 

1. Objectivity of Beauty 288 

a. Esthetic Semblance . . . . . . .292 

b. The Play-impulse . . . . . . .294 

2. Opposition of " Antique " and " Modern " . . . 296 

3. Schlegel on Schiller ........ 300 

4. Schiller on Schlegel -301 

II. Goethe 304 

1. Gothic Architecture . . . . . . . . 305 

i. Attitude to the Renaissance Tradition . . . 306 

ii. " Gothic " as a disparaging term 307 

iii. " Characteristic " Art . . . . . . 309 

2. Definitions of Hirt and Meyer . . . . . 311 

3. Goethe's Analysis of the Excellent in Art . . . -312 

4. Conclusion . . . . . . ^ . .316 

CHAPTER XII. 

Objective idealism — Schelling and Hegel. 

I. Schelling ..... . . . . -317 

i. Objectivity of Art and Beauty 319 

ii. Historical Treatment of " Ancient and Modern " . . 322 

iii. The Particular Arts 327 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



XXI 



PAGE 

II. i. Hegel — Dialectic in the ^Esthetic 334 

ii. The Conception of Beauty ...... 336 

a. The Beauty of Nature . . . . . -337 

(1) Beauty of Abstract Form .... 338 

(2) Beauty in Unity of Sense-Material . . . 339 
/3. Beauty of Art ; the Ideal . . . . . 340 

(1) Nature and the Ideal 340 

(2) The Ideal in Life and Action . . . -343 

(3) Evolution of the Ideal . . - . . . 345 

The Symbolic Art-form .... 346 
Classical Art-form ..... 346 
Romantic Art-form . . . . -347 

(4) Classification of the Arts .... 349 

a. The Double Basis ..... 349 
(B. Facts that Support the Double Basis . 350 
y. Principle of the Analytic Classification . 352 
i ii_ Four Leading Conceptions Defined . . . -355 

(1) Ugliness 355 

(2) The Sublime . . . . . . . . 356 

(3) The Tragic . . ■ 358 

(4) The Comic . . 360 

iv. Conclusion . , . . . . . . 360 



CHAPTER XIII. 

" Exact " ^esthetic in Germany. 

1. Need of Exact ^Esthetic . . 363 

2. Schopenhauer. . . . . . . . . 363 

i. Schopenhauer a kind of post-Kantian . . . 363 

ii. His account of the Beautiful, and its Modifications . . 365 

iii. Criticism of Schopenhauer ...... 368 

3. Herbart . . . . . . . . N . . 368 

i. His Formalism and its Consequences . 369 

ii. His Division of ^Esthetic Relations ..... 370 

iii. Classification of the Arts . 371 

iv. Criticism and Estimate . . . . . 372 

4. Zimmermann 373 

i. The Distinctive Work of Formal ^Esthetic . . -374 

ii. Meaning of the " Together " 376 

iii. Elementary and Simple Forms . . . -377 

iv. Psychological Meaning of the Theory, and its Value. . 380 



XXI 1 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



PAGE 



5. Fechner . . . . . - . ' . . 381 

i. Criticism of Previous Inquiries . . . -381 

ii. Experiments with Rectangles, etc. ..... 382 

iii. Esthetic Laws ........ 384 

6. Stumpf — Scope of his Analysis . . . . . -387 

7. Conclusion .......... 388 

i. How to judge of Formal ^Esthetic . . 388 

ii. Lesson of its History ....... 389 

iii. Inclusion of Exact ^Esthetic in Idealism . . . 391 

CHAPTER XIV. 

The methodical completion of objective idealism. 

1. Type of the later Objective Idealism ..... 393 

2. Transition to the later Objective Idealism .... 394 

o.. Solger 394 

/?. Reference to Weisse and Vischer . . . . -397 
y. Rosenkranz .......... 400 

i. Ugliness as such . . . . . , .401 

ii. Ugliness in art . 403 

iii. The forms of opposition ...... 406 

3. The later Objective Idealism . . . . . . 409 

a, Carriere . . 410 

i. The Ugly . . . . . . - . .411 

ii. Division of the Arts . . . . . .411 

iii. Attitude to the Renaissance . . . . .412 
ft. Schasler . . . 414 

i. Conceptions indicated by the " History " . . . 414 

ii. Ugliness, and Modifications of the Beautiful . -417 

iii. The Classification of the Arts 419 

a. The Parallelism 420 

b. The Mimic Dance 422 

c. The Material .423 

y. Hartmann ......... 424 

i. Significance of the History 425 

ii. The Degrees of Beauty ; and Ugliness . . .429 

a. The Orders of Formal Beauty . . . -429 

b. Ugliness in Nature 429 

c. Ugliness in Beauty ? 43 1 

(1) No Ugliness in Beauty . . . -432 

(2) Real Ugliness 435 

iii. The Division of the Arts ...... 436 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. XX111 



CHAPTER XV. 

PAGE 

Beginnings of a theoretical reunion of content and expres- 



sion. 

1. Philosophical Conditions of Recent English Esthetic . • 441 

2. General Influences of the Time ...... 442 

« a. Antiquities . . . . . . . . 442 

b. Science .......... 444 

c. Romantic Naturalism . . . . . . 445 

d. The Democratic Spirit 446 

3. Synthesis of Content and Expression ..... 447 

i. The Characteristic ........ 448 

ii. The Life of the Workman . . . . 45 1 

iii. The " Lesser Arts " . . . . . . 454 

iv. Penetrative Imagination and the Limits of Beauty . -458 

v. Classification by Material, Applied to Poetry . . . 460 

4. Conclusion . . .462 

i. Requirements of ^Esthetic Science to-day . . . 463 

ii. The Future of Art . . . . . . 467 

APPENDIX I. 

Hegel's Abstract of his ^Esthetic System 471 

APPENDIX II. 

• Some Analyses of Musical Expression, by Mr. J. D. Rogers . 488 

Bibliography 495 

Index 499 



HISTORY OF ^ESTHETIC. 



CHAPTER I. 

PROPOSED TREATMENT, AND ITS CONNECTION WITH THE 
DEFINITION OF BEAUTY. 

S e tSc° r an°d I - * T was not before the latter half of the eight- 
the mstory of eenth century that the term "Esthetic" was 

FiziB Ail*!) • • • • 

adopted with the meaning now recognised, in 
order to designate the philosophy of the beautiful as a dis- 
tinct province of theoretical inquiry. But the thing existed 
before the name ; for reflection upon beauty and upon fine 
art begins among Hellenic thinkers at least as early as the 
time of Socrates, if not, in a certain sense, with still earlier 
philosophers. 

If, then, "^Esthetic" means the Philosophy of the Beautiful, 
the History of ^Esthetic must mean the History of the Philo- 
sophy of the Beautiful ; and it must accept as its immediate 
subject-matter the succession of systematic theories by which 
philosophers have attempted to explain or connect together 
the facts that relate to beauty. 

But this is not all. It is found necessary in a historical 
treatment, even of logic or of general philosophy, to bring 
them into continuous relation with the concrete life that under- 
lies the formal conceptions which are being passed in review. 
The speculation of every age issues on the one hand from the 
formal teaching of the past, but on the other from the actual 
world as it urges itself upon consciousness in the present. As 
the history of logic or of general philosophy cannot be wholly 
dissociated from the history of science or of civilization, so the 
history of ethical or of aesthetic ideas is necessarily treated in 
some connection with the history of morals or of fine art. 

But within this analogy there is a notable distinction. 

B 



2 



HISTORY OF /ESTHETIC. 



When we read, for example, the history of the Inductive 
Sciences in connection with the growth of logical theory, we 
can take little interest in the bygone phases of particular 
branches of knowledge, except in as far as they help us to 
understand that development of the human mind which is at 
the moment the subject of our study. Antiquated chemistry 
or astronomy have for us an interest of curiosity no greater 
than that which a pile-dwelling or a flint hatchet has for the 
anthropological student. The same is true of many other 
elements of civilization, such as the details of political form or 
of social custom, the niceties of language, the minutiae of reli- 
gious dogma. In all these aspects of life, although it is true 
that to have deciphered the past greatly aids us in under- 
standing the present, yet on the whole, excepting with a view 
to scientific research or historical realization, we are accus- 
tomed to let bygones be bygones. Moral and religious ideas, 
indeed, such as have been all-powerful in a remote past, gener- 
ally retain a capacity of arousing our present interest ; so deep 
is the identity of man's moral nature throughout all its mani- 
festations. But nothing is in this respect on a level with the 
greater creations of fine art, including noble literature. They 
alone have an importance which rather increases than dimi- 
nishes as the ages go by. And thus when we attempt the 
task of tracing the aesthetic consciousness through the stages 
of its development, we have before us a concrete material not 
of mere antiquarian interest, but constituting a large propor- 
tion of what is valued for its own sake in the surroundings of 
our present life. The History of Fine Art is the history of 
the actual aesthetic consciousness, as a concrete phenomenon ; 
aesthetic theory is the philosophic analysis of this conscious- 
ness, for which the knowledge of its history is an essential 
condition. The history of aesthetic theory, again, is a narra- 
tive which traces the aesthetic consciousness in its intellectual 
form of aesthetic theory, but never forgets that the central 
matter to be elucidated is the value of beauty for human life, 
no less as implied in practice than as explicitly recognised in 
reflection. In spite of the natural repugnance which may be 
felt against analytic intermeddling with the most beautiful 
things which we enjoy, it must be counted an advantage of 
this branch of the history of philosophy that it promises us 
not merely a theoretical interpretation of what is past and 
gone, but some aid at least in our appreciation of realities 



PROPOSED TREATMENT. 



3 



which appear to be the least perishable inheritance that the 

world possesses. 

2. I have assumed in the last section that Fine 
Natural Beauty Art may be accepted, for theoretical purposes, as 
tothe Beauty t h e chief, if not the sole representative of the 

of Fine Art. . \ . r . . 

world of beauty, it is necessary to explain the 
point of view from which this assumption appears justifiable. 

All beauty is in perception or imagination. When we dis- 
tinguish Nature from Art as a province of the beautiful, we 
do not mean to suggest that things have beauty independently 
of human perception, as for example in reactions upon one 
another such as those of gravitation or solidity. We must 
therefore be taken to include tacitly in our conception of 
natural beauty some normal or average capacity of aesthetic 
appreciation: But if so, it is plain that " nature " in this rela- 
tion differs from "art" principally in degree, both being in 
the medium of human perception or imagination, but the one 
consisting in the transient and ordinary presentation or idea 
of the average mind, the other in the fixed and heightened 
intuitions of the genius which can record and interpret. 

Now in studying any department of physical causation, we 
should not think it possible to restrict ourselves to consider- 
ing the so-called facts which daily meet the eye of the un- 
trained observer. It is from science that we must learn how 
to perceive ; and it is upon science that we rely, both in our 
own observations as far as we are qualified observers, and 
also in the organized and recorded perceptions of others, from 
which almost the whole of our natural knowledge is practi- 
cally derived. 

Nature in the sphere of aesthetic is analogous to the percep- 
tion of the ordinary observer in matters of physical science. 
In the first place, it is limited for each percipient to the range 
of his own eyes and ears as exercised on the external world, 
for it does not exist in the form of recorded or communicable 
contents ; and in the second place, it passes into the province 
of art, not by a sudden transition, but by continuous modifica- 
tion, as the insight and power of enjoyment to which the 
beauty of nature is relative are disciplined and intensified by 
aesthetic training and general culture. Therefore, just as in 
speaking generally of the real world we practically mean the 
world as known to science, so in speaking generally of the 
beautiful in the world we practically mean the beautiful as 



HISTORY OF AESTHETIC. 



revealed by art. In both cases we rely upon the recorded 
perceptions of those who perceive best, both because they 
are the best perceptions and because they are recorded. This 
habit does not exclude the necessity of interpreting, appre- 
ciating, and, so far as may be, correcting the recorded 
perceptions by help of our own. Nor does the beauty of art, 
thus understood, exclude the beauty of nature. The fact that 
a completed " work of art" is a definite thing or action, which 
in some cases does not even represent any natural object, 
must indeed be duly considered, and the creative spirit must 
be recognised as a factor in artistic production. Nevertheless, 
it is a blunder to imagine that there is no art where there is> 
no " work of art," or that whenever the painter is not at work 
on a picture he sees the same nature as we see and no more. 
For this reason it is justifiable in theory, as it is necessary in 
practice, to accept fine art as the main representative of the 
beautiful for the purpose of philosophical study. Even such 
an analysis of natural beauty in the light of physical fact as 
has been attempted by Ruskin in the Modern Painters is 
chiefly directed to showing how great artists have extended 
the boundaries of so-called natural beauty, by their superior 
insight into the expressive capabilities of natural scenes and: 
objects. The standard by which the critic measures the 
achievement of the artist, when he says that he is measuring 
it by nature, is of course in the last resort his own artistic 
feeling and more or less trained perception. Nature for 
aesthetic theory means that province of beauty in which every 
man is his own artist. 

The Definition of 3- There is no definition of beauty that can be 
Beauty and said to have met with universal acceptance. It 

its Relation to , \ 

the History of appears, however, to be convenient that an ex~ 
iEsthetic pjanation should now be given of the sense in 
which the term will be employed in the present work. And 
if in such an explanation the fundamental theory of the 
ancients can be presented as the foundation for the most 
pregnant conception of the moderns, the resulting definition 
will at least lend itself readily to the purposes of a history of 
aesthetic. 

Among the ancients the fundamental theory of the beauti- 
ful was connected with the notions of rhythm, symmetry, 
harmony of parts ; in short, with the general formula of unity 
in variety. Among the moderns we find that more emphasis. 



DEFINITION OF BEAUTY. 



5 



is laid on the idea of significance, expressiveness, the utter- 
ance of all that life contains ; in general, that is to say, on the 
conception of the characteristic. If these two elements are 
reduced to a common denomination, there suggests itself as a 
comprehensive definition of the beautiful, " That which has 
characteristic or individual expressiveness for sense-perception 
or imagination, subject to the conditions of general or abstract 
expressiveness in the same medium." 

The quality which is thus defined is of wider range than 
the predicate "beautiful" as commonly understood. It will 
be for the subsequent historical treatment to show that 
neither fine art nor average aesthetic perception can in the 
long run be confined within narrower limits than these. A 
few words may be added here by way of anticipatory ex- 
planation. 

The commonplace view is not wholly at fault which sees in 
the great art of the ancient Hellenes chiefly the qualities of 
harmony, regularity, and repose. Although the whole theory 
of modern aesthetic may well find application and support in 
the real variety and significance of Hellenic decoration, sculp- 
ture, and poetry, yet, as science begins with what is most 
obvious, it is not surprising that aesthetic reflection should 
have called attention in the first instance to their pervading 
harmony and regularity. Qualities of this type, because they 
symbolize, in a mode that appeals to sense-perception, the most 
abstract relations of systematic and orderly action or existence, 
may fairly be set down under the head of general or abstract 
expressiveness. The recognition of these relations as con- 
stituent elements of the beautiful was the main contribution 
of ancient philosophy to aesthetic analysis. 

But when with the birth of the modern world the romantic 
sense of beauty was awakened, accompanied by the craving 
for free and passionate expression, it became impossible that 
impartial theory should continue to consider that the beautiful 
was adequately explained as the regular and harmonious, or 
as the simple expression of unity in variety. The theory of 
the sublime now makes its appearance, at first indeed outside 
the theory of the beautiful ; but it is followed by the analysis 
of the ugly, which develops into a recognised branch of 
aesthetic inquiry, with the result of finally establishing both 
the ugly and the sublime within the general frontier of beauty. • 
The instrument by wdiich this conciliation is effected is the 



6 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



conception of the characteristic or the significant; and the 
conflict between the harsher elements thus recognised and the 
common-sense requirement that all beauty should give 
pleasure, is mitigated, on the one hand by a cie facto en- 
largement of average aesthetic appreciation, and on the other 
hand by the acceptance of such primary relations as harmony, 
regularity, or unity, in the light of essential elements or- 
ganically determining all imaginable contents, and demanding, 
in their degree, characteristic expression for sense. 

'i'h us in the definition of beauty above suggested, the 
pregnant conception contributed by the moderns is merely a 
re-application in more concrete matter of the formal principle 
enunciated by the ancients. In the widest sense, then, and 
omitting to insist upon the narrower and commoner usage in 
which the characteristic — in the sense of individually charac- 
teristic — is opposed to the formal or symmetrical, it would be 
sufficient to define beauty as " the characteristic in as far as 
expressed for sense-perception or for imagination." 

If, indeed, we were attempting a psychological determina- 
tion of the feeling that attends or constitutes the peculiar 
enjoyment known as the enjoyment of beauty, we should 
probably have to deal with a term not mentioned in the defi- 
nition above proposed — the term pleasure. But in attempting 
to analyse the content which distinguishes perceptions or 
imaginations productive of this enjoyment from others which 
are not so productive, it appears to me that we should commit 
a serious error of method if we were to limit " expressiveness " 
or "characterization" either by beauty, which is the term to 
be defined, or by pleasantness, which is a quality not naturally 
coextensive with the term to be defined. The former error 
is not, in my judgment, wholly avoided by Goethe, when he 
insists that the characteristic, although essential to art, is yet 
a principle limited and conditioned by beauty in the strict 
sense, which is needed to soften the rigidity or abstraction of 
the characteristic. Thus the definition is made self-destruc- 
tive, beauty being at once the term to be defined, and an 
unanalysed limiting condition in the defining predicates. The 
latter error is committed in any such definition as that 
suggested by Schlegel, " the pleasant expression of the good." 
Things give pleasure sometimes because they are beautiful, 
and sometimes for other reasons. They are not beautiful 
simply because they give pleasure, but only in so far as they 



DEFINITION 07 BEAUTY. 



7 



give aesthetic pleasure ; and the nature of the presentation 
that gives aesthetic pleasure is the matter to be ascertained. 

It will be seen that the part played in Goethe's account by 
the term beauty or grace, as a formal condition of artistic 
treatment, and in Schlegel's account by the differentia plea- 
sant, intended to guard against caricature or defect of har- 
mony, is transferred in the definition which I have ventured 
to suggest to the formal or general element of characteristic 
expression, the element of unity or totality as symbolised 
by harmonious, symmetrical, or coherent dispositions of lines, 
surfaces, colours, or sounds. It would be tautology to super- 
add the condition of pleasantness to this formal element of 
the characteristic, if the two terms mean the same thing, as I 
believe that in aesthetic experience they do ; while if pleasant- 
ness were taken in the normal range of its psychological mean- 
ing, and not as thus both limited and extended by identification 
with cesthetic pleasantness, the definition would become in- 
disputably too narrow, even supposing that its other elements 
prevented it from being also too wide. The highest beauty, 
whether of nature or of art, is not in every case pleasant to v' 
the normal sensibilility even of civilized mankind, and is 
judged by the consensus, not of average feeling as such, but 
rather of the tendency of human feeling in proportion as it 
is developed by education and experience. And what is 
pleasant at first to the untrained sense — a psychological fact 
more universal than the educated sensibility — is not as a rule, 
though it is in some cases, genuinely beautiful. 

The definition, then, should be either purely analytic of 
contents accepted as beautiful — purely metaphysical, if we like 
to call it so — or purely psychological. To introduce a psycho- 
logical differentia into a metaphysical definition obtained by 
comparing the actual data of beauty, is to introduce a factor 
which we cannot control, because the differentia so introduced 
is itself in need of analysis and limitation on purely psycho- 
logical ground before it will coincide with the data to be in- 
vestigated. Some attempts at psychological analysts will be 
recorded and criticised in the course of this history ; I will at 
present simply suggest as an approximate psychological defi- 
nition of aesthetic enjoyment " Pleasure in the nature of a 
feeling or presentation, as distinct from pleasure in its momen- 
tary or expected stimulation of the organism." Such pleasure 
would always, it is my belief, be connected in fact with the 



8 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



significance of the content of feeling, but the meeting-point 
of the psychological and metaphysical definitions would not 
fall within the scope of psychology. 

In hope of dispelling any prejudice that may be raised 
against this conception on account of its apparent tendency to 
intellectualism, I will show in a few words how it is generated 
by consideration of extreme cases in the domain even of non- 
aesthetic feeling. If anything in the region of taste, smell, 
touch, heat or cold, has a value akin to that of beauty, it is 
not, surely, either the strongest or the most delightful sensa- 
tion, but rather the most suggestive sensation, or that which 
is most highly charged with associated ideas, so normal that 
we do not take them to be accidental. Not the scent of 
Eau-de-Cologne, but the smell of peat smoke or of the sea, 
not the comfortable warmth of the house, but the freshness of 
the morning air, are sensations of a kind in which we may 
feel a certain disinterested delight not wholly dissimilar to 
aesthetic enjoyment. The merest germ of the sense of beauty 
seems to imply a distinction between stimulus and signifi- 
cance. 

I have thus, I hope, justified in three respects the procedure 
which I intend to adopt. 

First, I have given my reasons for treating the history of 
^Esthetic as an account, not merely of aesthetic systems, but, 
so far as may be in my power, of the aesthetic consciousness 
which has furnished material for these systems, and has formed 
the atmosphere in which they arose. 

Secondly, I have explained the necessity which compels 
aesthetic theory to accept fine art as the main representative 
of the beautiful, and I have attempted to show that this 
necessity does not force us to neglect any important element of 
the facts with which we are to deal. 

Thirdly, I have propounded, in a few words, a definition of 
the beautiful which lends itself to the development of modern 
out of ancient aesthetic by a natural progression from the 
abstract to the concrete, analogous to the equally natural ad- 
vance from the classical to the Christian world of artistic pro- 
duction and insight into nature. And I have attempted to 
lay down a thorough distinction between the analytic and 
comparative treatment of beautiful presentations with reference 
to their common properties qua beautiful as progressively 
recognised in the development of culture, and the psychological 



DEFINITION OF BEAUTY. 



9 



inquiry into the nature and differentia of that enjoyment 
which these presentations produce. It is plain that these two 
investigations have a common frontier in the connection be- 
tween elements of presentation and elements of enjoyment ; 
but in order that they may effectually co-operate, it is essential 
that they should not at the outset be confused. 

In the next chapter I propose to begin the examination of 
the aesthetic feeling and theory prevalent among the ancient 
Hellenes. 



CHAPTER II. 



THE CREATION OF A POETIC WORLD, AND ITS FIRST 
ENCOUNTER WITH REFLECTION. 

E Hostite?o Art n T * * F we a PP r oach the earlier Greek philosophers, 
or even Plato, the prophet of beauty, expecting 
to find in them a simple reflex and appreciation of the plastic 
and poetic fancy of their countrymen, we shall be seriously 
disappointed. The thought of Hellas passed through all the 
phases which were natural to profound and ardent intelligence 
at first freely turned upon the world ; and the partial truths 
which it successively attained were uttered with a definiteness 
and audacity which conveys a first impression of something 
like perversity. 

When a modern reader finds that the fair humanities of old 
religion aroused among the wisest of early philosophers either 
unsparing condemnation or allegorical misconception, he is 
forced to summon up all his historical sympathy if he would 
not conclude that Heracleitus and Xenophanes and Plato, and 
the allegorising interpreters of whom Plato tells us, were in- 
capable of rational criticism. But in reality this moral and 
metaphysical analysis, directed against the substance of a 
poetic fancy which was thus beginning to be distinguished from 
prosaic history, was the natural sequel of artistic creation, and 
the natural forerunner of more appreciative theory, 
creation of the 2. The creation of Hellenic poetry and forma- 
worid of Beauty. t ^ ve art ma y fo Q regarded as an intermediate 

stage between popular practical religion and critical or philoso- 
phical reflection. The legendary content of this art was not 
the work of the poet or the formative artist, but of the national 
mind in its long development out of savagery. Its imagina- 
tive form, on the other hand, was due indeed to the national 
mind, but to this mind chiefly as it acted through the individu- 
ality of poetic genius, investing the national thought and 
emotion with progressive significance and refinement. For 
although it may be doubted whether the word corresponding 



CREATION OF A POETIC WORLD. 



to beauty or the beautiful was ever used in the whole range 
of Hellenic antiquity in a meaning perfectly free from confu- 
sion with truth or goodness, yet it is certain that art is more 
than nature, and that the definite presentation of ideas in 
beautiful shape cannot but prepare the way for an explicit 
aesthetic judgment by developing a distinct type of sentiment 
and enjoyment. 

Thus in Hellenic art and poetry, as it existed in the middle 
of the 5th century B.C., we find embodied a consciousness in 
relation to beauty, which, if much less than theoretically ex- 
plicit, is much more than practical and natural. There is a 
naive apprehension of a profound truth in the familiar saying 
of Herodotus, 1 that Homer and Hesiod made the Hellenic / 
theogony, and determined the forms and attributes of the gods 
for Hellenic belief. The full force of this reflection is mea- 
sured by the interval between the early wooden image and 
the Phidian statue, or between the superstition of a savage 
and Antigone's conception of duty. It was in the world of 
fine art that Hellenic genius had mainly recorded, and, in 
recording, had created, this transformation. 
Reason for the 3' When therefore the first recognition of the 

Attitude of existence and significance of art takes the shape of 
e ecaon. hostility to the anthropomorphic content which it 
retains, we see not only that the reflective idea of beauty is 
still conspicuous by its absence, but that theory in advancing 
beyond the popular faith fails to recognise the actual refine- 
ment of that faith by which poetic fancy has paved the way 
for the speculative criticism which condemns it. 

On the other hand, w r e must observe that the criteria now 
actually applied — the wholly unsesthetic criteria of reality and 1/ 
of morality — spring from a principle from which w r e shall only 
in part escape within the limits of Hellenic antiquity. 

This principle is, as we shall see, that an artistic representa- 
tion cannot be treated as different in kind or in aim from a 
reality of ordinary life. To make distinction between them is 
always a hard lesson for immature reflection ; but for a Hellenic 
thinker there were reasons which made it all but impossible. 
The Greek world of ideas, before or outside the philosophic 
schools, was wholly free from dualism. Its parts were homo- 
geneous. The god, for example, was not conceived as an 



1 Hdt. 2. 53 



12 HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



unseen being merely capable of an incarnation, such as could 
not express or exhaust his full spiritual nature ; rather his real 
shape was human, though to reveal it to mortal eye might be 
a rare favour, and he lived in a particular hill or in a particu- 
lar temple. The representation of a divine being was to 
the Greek not a mere symbol, but a likeness ; not a symbol 
which might faintly suggest Him who could be known only in 
the spirit, but a likeness of one who dwelt on earth, and whose 
nature was to be visible, and not to be invisible. Thus, in 
speaking of a question about the supernatural in Homer, 
Schelling has said that in Homer there is no supernatural, 
because the Greek god is a part of nature. And therefore, 
although a work of creative idealization unparalleled in the 
history of the world had been performed by the plastic fancy 
of Greece in the age that culminated with the highest art of 
Athens, yet in the absence of any mystic sense of an invisible 
order of realities the prevalent impression produced by this 
world of beauty was rather that of imitative representation 
than of interpretative origination. 

Neglected 4" Even the idea of imitation, indeed, contains 
suggestion in the germ of a fuller aesthetic truth than was ever 
idea of imitation. atta i nec j Hellenic thought ; for the translation 
of an object into a plastic medium involves a double and not 
merely a single element, — not merely a consideration of the 
object to be represented, but a consideration of the act of 
imaginative production by which it is born again under the 
new conditions imposed by another medium. Natural com- 
mon sense expressed this truth in one of the earliest aesthetic 
judgments that Western literature contains, when on the shield 
of Achilles, the Homeric poet says, 1 " the earth looked dark 
behind the plough, and like to ground that had been ploughed, 
althottgh it was made of gold ; that was a marvellous piece of 
work." 

The "marvel " is that the mind can confer on a medium of 
its own choosing the characteristic semblance of what it desires 
to represent. But of all that depends upon this side of imitation 
— the spiritual second birth of beauty — we hear but little ex- 
plicitly in Hellenic science, although, within defective formulae, 
some glimpses of it forced themselves upon Aristotle. For 
the reasons which have been indicated — the tendency of all 



i//. 17. 543. 



IMITATION AND IDEALISM. 



13 



immature reflection to judge by reality and utility, and the 
absence of a belief in anything which could not be visibly 
imitated — the poetic or creative side of artistic representation 
did not wholly come to its rights in antiquity. Perhaps it 
was even less regarded by the philosophers than it was, in the 
consciousness of poetic inspiration, by the epic and lyric 
poets, or by Plato himself outside his formal treatment of the 
metaphysic of imitative art. 

wide use of 5. It is however the case that the term imita- 
Mon"in Ancient tion in ancient aesthetic theory is opposed rather 

Philosophy. t0 industrial production than to artistic origina- 
tion, and is compatible with a considerable variation and expan- 
sion of import, which I shall endeavour to trace in a separate 
chapter. It is natural that the earliest formula adopted by 
reflection should be strained to breaking point before it is 
abandoned. 

Further Ex- 6. It may still appear extraordinary to us, after 
pianation how a u [ s S2i id, that the art which we contrast with 

Greek Art could ' . • 1 1 1 

he called M imi- our own as m a peculiar sense ideal, and as equally 
remote from the vicious attempt at illusion, and 
from the justifiable delight in detail, should have been charac- 
terized by enlightened opinion in its own day as a mode of 
imitation or mere representation. 

If this is our feeling, we may profitably consider .in two 
respects the nature of the art which we are discussing. 

Facility of imi- lm ^ n tne ^ rst pl ace > just because the Hellenic 
tative Artmakes artist or poet was free from the overwhelming 
sense of spiritual significance which is the 
essence of mystic symbolism, he was able to delineate in 
large and "ideal" outlines the general impressions which he 
gathered from life by a scrutiny not too microscopic. It is 
not unnatural that the art which sets itself to portray what 
attracts it in a complete and actual world should be more full 
of repose and less tormented with the subtleties of expression 
than an art to which every minutest human or natural feature 
may be of unutterable symbolic significance. 
Hellenic Art not ii. And if we thus see how an imitative art, 
ideai^has 7 unburdened with a " mission " or revelation, may 
heen thought. De ideal simply because it is at ease ; on the 
other hand we must to some extent correct our traditional 
conception of the degree in which Hellenic beauty was devoid 
of strangeness, and humour, and animated expression.. The 



14 



HISTORY OF /ESTHETIC. 



critics from whom we have derived our current notions of the 
"classical" and the "antique" have of course performed a 
necessary task, and have revealed a distinction as deep as 
life between the ancient and the modern world. Yet/i/ater 
all, the ancient world also was alive, and possessed a range of 
sympathetic expressiveness which was but inadequately ren- 
dered in the first impression made upon modern theorists by 
fragments of its monumental sculpture. The identification 
of the ancient ideal with the general or abstract, which a due 
regard to Greek literature might at once have proved to be a 
very partial truth, has been further modified by the labour of 
more than a century in piecing together the plastic surround- 
ings of this ancient life, and appreciating the descriptions 
which assist us to realize them. "The task before me," 1 
writes one whose work in this direction must be a revelation 
to all who are not specialists in archaeology, " The task before 
me is touched with inevitable sadness. The record we have 
to read is the record of what we have lost. That loss, but for 
Pausanias, we should never have realized. He, and he only, 
gives us the real live picture of what the art of ancient Athens 
was. Even the well-furnished classical scholar pictures the 
Acropolis as a stately hill approached by the Propylsea, 
crowned by the austere beauty of the Parthenon, and adds to 
his picture perhaps the remembrance of some manner of 
Erechtheion, a vision of colourless marble, of awe, restraint, 
severe selection. Only Pausanias tells him of the colour and 
life, the realism, the quaintness, the forest of votive statues, 
the gold, the ivory, the bronze, the paintings on the walls, 
the golden lamps, the brazen palm-trees, the strange old 
Hermes hidden in myrtle leaves, the ancient stone on which 
Silenus sat, the smoke-grimed images of Athene, Diitrephes all 
pierced with arrows, Kleoitas with his silver nails, the heroes 
peeping from the Trojan horse, Anacreon singing in his cups ; 
all these, if we would picture the truth and not our own 
imagination, we must learn of, and learn of from Pausanias. 

" But if the record of our loss is a sad one, it has its meed of 
sober joy ; it is the record also of what — if it be ever so little 
— in these latter days we have refound." 

It is not a false opinion that harmony, severity, and repose 



1 Mythology and Monuments of And. Athens, by Miss T. E. Harrison, xi., 
xii. 



THE BEGINNING OF THEORY. 



15 



are fundamental characters of Hellenic craft and fancy ; the 
history of a single decorative form, such as the acanthus 
foliage, is enough to illustrate the profoundness of the contrast 
thus indicated between the antique and the modern. But we 
must master and adhere to the principle that although the 
given boundaries of Greek aesthetic theory can be in some 
degree justified by the comparative limitations of the art 
which was its material, yet this justification is only relative, 
and means not that Greek aesthetic was an adequate account 
of Greek art, but only that it was a natural and obvious one. 

Thus we shall find that true aesthetic analysis among the 
Greeks extended only to the most formal element that enters 
into Hellenic beauty : while its passion and its human signifi- 
cance and its touches of common things attracted the censure of 
an unaesthetic criticism and supported the classification of the 
whole range of artistic utterance under the superficial title of 
" imitation." Had the realism of the antique been less modest 
and refined, it would have challenged an analysis which would 
have replaced censure by explanation. But the time for this 
was not yet ; and it will be seen that in spite of the protests 
of the philosopher and the satirical comedian, theory was 
forced in the long run to become more subtly appreciative as 
art became less severely noble. 

_ - 7. We have now arrived at the point where 

The Ground . ' . , . , . , . , r , . 

Prepared for the strictly philosophical consideration 01 aesthetic 
^stnetic Tneorv. ph enomena mav fog expected to begin. A world 

of beautiful shapes and fancies has been brought into being, 
which must of necessity have trained the perception to re- 
cognise beauty as displayed in the corresponding province 
of nature, that is, mainly in the human form, and must have 
developed some partly conscious sentiment of the beautiful 
as distinQTiishable from the Sfood and the true. This imaginary 
world has been recognised as a new creation both negatively 
by the claims of the metaphysician and the moralist, and 
positively by the naive appreciation of the historian and the 
allegorising construction of the mystic. The mystic is the 
forerunner of a later age ; but the historian and the philo- 
sopher agree, by their acquiescence and their censure respec- 
tively, in treating it as claiming to pass for a simple reproduction 
of natural reality. And thus the immense panorama depicted 
by Hellenic imagination enters the range of philosophic vision 
under the title of mimetic or representative art. 



CHAPTER III. 



THE FUNDAMENTAL OUTLINES OF GREEK THEORY CONCERNING 

THE BEAUTIFUL. 

The Principles The present chapter will be devoted to statins: 

and their Con- . . r . 1 „ r . . . & 

nexion. m logical connexion, regardless 01 any historical 
development within the limits of antiquity, the general prin- 
ciples which determine all Hellenic thinkers in their inquiries 
concerning the beautiful. The task of tracing historically the 
pressure which progressive insight and experience brought to 
bear upon these conceptions, with the consequent straining of 
the formulae until breaking point was reached, will be attempted 
in the following chapter so far as space and ability permit. 

The cumbrous expression, " theory concerning the beauti- 
ful," has been intentionally adopted. For of the three con- 
nected principles which constitute the framework of Hellenic 
speculation upon the nature and value of beauty, there is one 
only that can claim the more convenient title of " aesthetic 
theory." 

The two other principles in question might be respectively 
described as moralistic and as metaphysical, although the 
common root of both is itself a metaphysical assumption 
which is also responsible for the limitation of true aesthetic 
analysis in the third principle to the abstract conditions of 
expression. 

This metaphysical assumption, natural to incipient specula- 
tion, is to the effect that artistic representation is no more than 
a kind of common-place reality — of reality, that is, as presented 
to normal sense-perception and feeling — and that it is related 
precisely as the ordinary objects of perception are related, to 
man and his purposes, subject only to a reservation on ac- 
count of its mode of existence being less solid and complete 
than that of the objects from which it is drawn. 

This belief is intimately bound up with the conception of 
a homogeneous or thoroughly natural world, which makes it 



ART AN INFERIOR REALITY. 



necessary to assume that the essence of art and beauty does 
not lie in a symbolic relation to an unseen reality behind the 
objects of common sense-perception, but in mere imitative 
relation to those common objects themselves. It was this 
prevalent idea that dictated the philosophical treatment to be 
accorded to the newly recognised phenomena of an art which 
produced only images of things, and not the useful realities 
known and handled in every-day life. It was not as yet ob- 
served that the ultimate import of these phenomena, involving 
the total separation of aesthetic semblance from practical 
reality, was incompatible with the idea which throughout 
antiquity controlled their interpretation. 

A sufficient verification of the predominance of this principle 
is to be found in the current generalisation by which both 
Plato and Aristotle gathered up the arts which we call the 
fine arts under the name " imitative " or "image-making" as 
contrasted in the first instance with those which are "produc- 
tive" or "thing-making." 1 Even in Plotinus imitation is the 
general term which describes the attempt to create beautiful 
forms or fancies for the purpose of aesthetic enjoyment. It 
may be well also to point out a passage in Aristotle's Politics 2 
which may fairly be paraphrased, as asserting that man is, as a 
matter of course, affected by the reality of a fact in the same 
way as by its representation, so that what we learn to like or 
dislike in the semblance for its mere form, we shall similarly 
like or dislike in the reality. This is a doctrine which Aris- 
totle in part knew how to qualify, as will be seen in the next 
chapter ; but Plato followed it uncompromisingly through his 
entire theoretical treatment of the imamnation. 

o 

From this metaphysical assumption there arise in close 
connection the two principles concerning beauty, w T hich I L^e 
called metaphysical and moralistic respectively ; and also the 
restriction of aesthetic theory proper, to what is contained in 
the third principle. I arrange these principles in an ascend- 
ing order according to their aesthetic value. 

Moralistic i. If artistic representation is related to man 
Principle. on jy as CO mmon-place reality, then to represent an 
immoral content is only to double the examples of immorality, 
and to strengthen, by suggestion, the incitements to it. In 
other words, it follows that morally the representations of art 



1 Plato, Sophist, 266 D. Ar., Phys., 199 A. 15. 2 Ar., Pol., 1340 a. 26. 

C 



i8 



HISTORY OF AESTHETIC. 



must be judged, in respect of their content, by the same moral 
criteria as real life. 
Metaphysical 2. If artistic representation differs from the 
Principle, nature which it represents, whether human or other, 
only in the degree and completeness of its existence, then 
it differs only for the worse, and is a purposeless reduplication 
of what already was in the world. In other words, it follows 
that, metaphysically, art is a second nature, only in the sense 
of being an incomplete reproduction of nature. 

^Esthetic 3- If artistic presentation can never have a 
principle, deeper content than the normal or common-place 
object of perception w T hich it represents, then there can be no 
explanation of beauty involving any deeper attributes than 
those which normal perception is able to apprehend in com- 
mon-place reality. In other words, it follows that, cest helically > 
beauty is purely formal, consisting in certain very abstract 
conditions which are satisfied, for example, in elementary geo- 
metrical figures as truly as in the creations of fine art. 

I will discuss these principles in order, with reference to 
their general predominance in Hellenic theory, and to their 
aesthetic significance. 

Moralistic i. It would be idle to deny that both Plato and 
Principle. Aristotle are encumbered with moralistic consider- 
ations throughout the whole of their inquiry into the nature 
of fine art. How far either of them approached the accepted 
modern doctrine that aesthetic interest in the beauty of a pre- 
sentation is distinct from the real or selfish interest in its 
actual existence for the satisfaction of desire, is, according to 
the plan which I have adopted, a question for the next chapter. 
It is enough at present to establish the general point of view 
before us as actual in Hellenic theory by the following con- 
sideration. 

how it snows a The moral and practical judgment is the first 
itself. intellectual outcome of organized social life, and is 
inevitably turned upon the world of beauty so long as this is 
undistinguished from the objects which constitute the means 
and purposes of real action. Not only Heracleitus and Xeno- 
phanes, with their condemnation of Homer, but Aristophanes, 
with his praise of him as a teacher of good life, and with his 
corresponding censure of Euripides, are examples of this 
mode of opinion, which, in fact, persists strongly in unpractised 
minds even in the modern world. 



MUST THE HERO BE GOOD ? 



19 



The two great philosophers betray in this respect, though 
in somewhat different degrees, a naive directness of judgment 
extremely trying to any modern reader who is not thoroughly 
trained in the habit of historical appreciation. They appear 
to abandon themselves almost unsuspectingly to the above- 
mentioned principle, that the resemblance has the same effects 
as the normal realitv. The distinction between ima^e and 
object, which was destined in the long run to grow into a 
recognition that beauty and practical reality affect the mind in 
quite different ways, has for Plato mainly the effect of intensi- 
fying his moralistic suspicion of the unreal simulacrum which 
fancy supplies. For the imagination, he believes, 1 is psycho- 
logically connected with the emotions ; and therefore the 
imaginary world of art, while sharing the power of the real 
world to form habit by example, possesses that of creating 
emotional disturbance in a far greater degree. 

And it cannot be maintained that Aristotle breaks the net 
of this assumption, which we saw that he expressly formulates, 
however much he may have done to strain it. The student of 
modern aesthetic will find himself, when he reads the Poetics, 
In a region almost wholly strange to his ideas of criticism. It 
is plain, for example, that Aristotle shrinks from a true tragic 
collision, 2 in which passion or character determine the indi- 
vidual's destiny, and this in spite of the abundance in which 
such individualities as those of Prometheus, Clytsemnestra, 
CEdipus, Aias, Antigone and Medea, were presented to his view 
by ancient tragedy. And the reason plainly lies in his subjec- 
tion of all criticism to his division of character into good, bad, 
and indifferent, 3 excluding-, ipso facto, all that conflict of a great 
passion or purpose with the surrounding world, in which tragic 
interest properly consists, and which make the character a 
symbol of forces that lie behind the phenomena of life as 
named by current morality. The conclusion that the hero of 
tragedy must be neither very good nor very bad, 4 and that his 
fate must be determined by error and not by wickedness, is 
unintelligible to modern judgment. We think that the hero 
may be both very good and very bad, that is to say, that he 
must above all things be great, and comprehend in himself the 

1 Republic, p. 606. 

2 Poet., xiii. 3 and 4. See SusemihEs notes, which represent Aristotle's idea 
tin the most modern colours possible. 

3 Ibid. * Ibid. 



20 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



differences which make possible the highest discord, and there- 
fore the highest harmony. All these ideas are excluded ab 
initio by the moralistic categories under which Aristotle sub- 
sumes his species of tragic plots. 

Then again, as we should expect, it is his preference 1 that 
the fatal action in which a tragedy culminates should be done 
in ignorance, and its nature only discovered afterwards ; for 
the discovery, if made in time, would have, he thinks, the 
effect of preventing the terrible action from taking place. The 
plot of the Medea, which he mentions in this context, is 
therefore naturally censured by implication as shocking. 

So, too, with the classification of artists. Here the natural 
pre-eminence of the moralistic point of view is very trenchantly 
laid down. It is simplest to quote the passage (the point 
being to distinguish species of imitation, according to the 
objects which they imitate): — 2 

" Now all artistic representation is of persons acting, and 
these must necessarily be either noble or inferior (for all moral 
temperament [ethos] conforms to this distinction ; for it is 
goodness and badness of moral temperament by which all 
men are distinguished from each other) — that is, either better 
in comparison with us, or worse, or just like ourselves. So 
we may see with the painters : Polygnotus painted people 
better, Pauson worse, Dionysius just like ourselves. From 
all this it is clear, that each of the kinds of representation which 
has been mentioned will include these differences, and will 
have different species according as the objects which it repre- 
sents differ in this way. For these dissimilarities may occur 
even in dancing or in performances on the flute or the lyre, 
and so too poetry may display them whether it be with or 
without verse ; for instance, Homer represents nobler char- 
acters, Kleophon average ones, Hegemon of Thasos, the 
first to make parodies, and Nicochares, who wrote the Deliad. 
below the average. . . . And this is the difference that 
distinguishes tragedy from comedy, for the latter aims at 
representing worse people, and the former better, than those 
of present reality." 

Here again the student, not only of Shakespeare and 
Goethe, but of Homer and of the Attic drama, entirely loses 
his bearings. It seems to him that the poetic world is stronger 



1 Poet., xiv. 6, 8, 9. 



2 Poet., ii. 



GREEK MORALISM. 



and more emphatic in its attributes, alike in the good as in the 
evil, than the world of every-day life, as presented to every- 
day observation. What about Thersites ? as Mr. Mahaffy 
asks. The poet who should represent individuals as only 
better than common men, or again as only worse, would be 
to us simply a monster, except in so far as the art of Aristo- 
phanic comedy is concerned ; and even here the adjective 
"worse," with its moralistic associations, does not at all 
express the true bearing of the representation, which it seems 
probable that Aristotle was unable to appreciate. 

Many subtleties might be urged against this interpretation 
of Aristotle, and to some of them it will be attempted to do 
justice when we speak of modifications within Hellenic theory. 
But it does not appear to me that we should be justified in 
hampering ourselves by such refinement, to the extent of 
denying that Plato and Aristotle had their feet firmly planted 
within the compass of naive practical moralism, however 
much they may have looked away to other and more fertile 
regions. 

6. It must be remembered, however, that grant- 
' inor the almost total absence of a distinctively 
aesthetic standpoint, there is no form in which a healthy 
sense of relative values could assert itself with respect to art, 
except the form of moralistic criticism. The content of such 
a criticism is the determination that the central core of life 
shall have justice done to it in the representation of life, and 
this determination is characteristic of the temper in which not 
only genuine speculation, but the greatest works of art. have 
always originated. 

The development of moral reflection by Plato into apparent 
hostility to nearly the whole world of classical beauty must 
be regarded historically speaking as a reduction ad absurdzim, 
not of the human content, but of the non-sesthetic form of the 
principle which he professed to be advocating. And it is 
hard to believe that in this and other respects he was wholly 
unaware of some such ironical import in his own speculations. 
The technical defect thus revealed consists in substituting a 
direct connection of subordination for an indirect connection 
of co-ordination between the spheres of beauty and of the 
moral order. By this subordination beauty is required to 
represent the moral order as moral, and nothing more ; 
whereas it is really an expression, co-ordinate with the moral 



22 



HISTORY OF AESTHETIC. 



order as a whole and not bound under its rules, of that larger 
complication and unity of things which reflects itself in the 
sense of beauty on the one hand, and on the other hand in 
the social will. 

But not only is the substance of early moral criticism sound; 
in one definite relation even its form is justifiable. 

Beauty, indeed, within its own territory of expression for 
expression's sake, is secure from praise or censure upon purely 
moral grounds. But wherever expression is not for expres- 
sion's sake, but is determined by alien motives such as the 
promotion of virtue or knowledge, or again the stimulation of 
sensuous desire, then it is outside the aesthetic frontier, and 
moral criticism upon it is justified not only in substance but 
also in form. It is doubtful, indeed, whether ancient philosophy 
ever thoroughly applied the distinction between aesthetic and 
practical interest ; but it is plain that this very failure to 
distinguish between them in theory is largely owing to the 
constant confusion between them in practice, and that the 
censure which pronounced much of fine art to be immoral 
involved a consciousness that true aesthetic interest must be 
pure, and was only mistaken in admitting that which it con- 
demned to be fine art at all. 

Then the estimation of beauty by the practical standard of 
right and wrong, although unaesthetic in form, contains two 
elements of aesthetic value. It bears witness to the instinctive 
v demand for depth and completeness in art as representing the 
powers that reveal themselves in that order of the world of 
which the moral order is one among other significant reflec- 
tions ; and it embodies the conviction that there is a spurious 
art and beauty, which being not free but subservient to a 
practical or sensuous end, cease to be objects of aesthetic judg- 
ment and become the legitimate prey of moral censure or 
commendation. And censure of these must indeed always be 
one degree truer than commendation ; for a fraud, however 
pious, can never be wholly satisfying to morality. Now the 
pretence of beauty, in a presentation the true interest of which 
is other than aesthetic, must always be in some degree 
a fraud. 

A difficulty presents itself at this point which cannot be 
treated in full till we come to deal with the niceties of modern 
analysis. At present we can only observe that this distinction 
between free and servile or spurious beauty depends not on 



PLATO ON IMITATION. 



23 



the description, necessarily abstract as all language is, which 
the artist or percipient may give of his own purpose or ground 
of enjoyment, but on the degree in which, as a matter of fact, 
an abstraction due to an alien purpose of any kind whatever 
is apparent as distorting the presentation. 

■me Metaphysical 2 - The formative and poetic art of Hellas at 
Principle. close of the 5th century B.C. had attained a 

completeness in itself which was emphasized by a pause in 
its development and an indication of new tendencies. It 
was natural that at such a moment its significance should 
challenge the attention of the great contemporary philosopher, 
and also that his treatment of it should consist in an explicit 
formulation of the current Hellenic conception, such as on the 
one hand to lay by its help the foundation-stone of all sound 
aesthetic theory, while on the other hand to exhibit by a 
reductio ad absurdum the onesidedness of the conception itself. 
In estimating the achievement of such a philosophy, it is not 
necessary to consider how far it was intentional. We have 
to accept its doctrines in their actual significance, and not to 
inquire whether Plato may ever have entertained any other 
view of art and imagination than that which he found it 
necessary to analyse. 
How it shows o. I quote a passage which summarises the 
itself. doctrine of Plato's well-known polemic against all 
representative art. 1 

" And there is another artist [besides the workman who 
makes useful real things]. I should like to know what you 
would say of him. 
Who is he ? 

One who is the maker of all the works of all other workmen. 
This is he who makes not only vessels of every kind, 
but plants and animals, himself and all other things — the 
earth and heaven, and the things which are in heaven or 
under the earth ; he makes the gods also. . . . Do you 
not see that there is a way in which you could make them 
yourself? — there are many ways in which the feat might be 
accomplished, none quicker than that of turning a mirror round 
and round — you would soon make the sun and the heaven 
and the earth and yourself, and other animals and plants, and 
all the other creatures of art as well as of nature, in the mirror. 



1 Republic, bk. x Jowett, n:arg., p. 596 7. 



2 4 



HISTORY OF /ESTHETIC. 



" Yes, he said ; but that is an appearance only. 

"Very good, I said, you are coming to the point now ; and 
the painter, as I conceive, is just a creator of this sort, is he 
not ? 

" Of course. 

" But then I suppose you will say that what he creates is 
untrue. And yet there is a sense in which the painter also 
creates a bed ? 

" Yes, he said, but not a real bed. 

" And what of the manufacturer of the bed ? did you not say 
that he does not make the idea which, according to our view, 
is the essence of the bed, but only a particular bed ? 

" Yes, I did. 

" Then if he does not make that which exists he cannot 
make true existence but only some semblance of existence ; 
and if any one were to say that the w r ork of the manufacturer 
of the bed, or of any other workman, has real existence, he 
could hardly be supposed to be speaking the truth. — No 
wonder then that his work too is an indistinct expression of 
truth. — Well then here are three beds, one existing in nature 
which as I think that we may say, is made by God — there is 
another which is the work of the carpenter ? And the work 
of the painter is a third ? Beds then are of three kinds, and 
there are three artists who superintend them : God, the manu- 
facturer of the bed, and the painter ? — God, whether from 
choice or necessity, created one bed in nature and one only ; 
two or more such ideal beds neither ever have been nor ever 
will be made by God. . . . Shall we then speak of Him 
as the natural author or maker of the bed ? 

" Yes, he replied, inasmuch as by the natural power of 
creation He is the author of this and of all other things. 

" And what shall we say of the carpenter ; is not he also 
the maker of the bed ? 

" Yes. 

" But would you call the painter a creator and maker ? 
" Certainly not. 

"Yet if he is not the maker, what is he in relation to the 

bed ? 

" I think, he said, that we may fairly designate him as 
the imitator of that which the others make. 

" Good, I said ; then you call him who is third in the 
descent from nature an imitator ; and the tragic poet is an 



POPULAR NOTIONS OF ART. 



25 



imitator, and therefore like all other imitators he is thrice 
removed from the king 1 and from truth ? 

" That appears to be the case. Then about the imitator 
we are agreed. And now about the painter ; I would like to 
know whether he imitates that which originally exists in 
nature, or only the creations of artists [artificers] ? 

" The latter. 

"As they are, or as they appear? you have still to 
determine this. — I mean, that you may look at a bed from 
different points of view, obliquely or directly or from any 
other point of view, and the bed will appear different, but 
there is no difference in reality. Which is the art of painting 
— an imitation of things as they are, or as they appear — of 
appearance or of reality ? 

M Of appearance. 

"Then the imitator, I said, is a long way off the truth, 
and can do all things because he only lightly touches on a 
small part of them, and that part an image. For example : a 
painter will paint a cobbler, carpenter, or any other artificer, 
though he knows nothing of their arts ; and if he is a good 
artist, he may deceive children or simple persons when he 
shows them his picture of a carpenter from a distance, and 
they will fancy that they are looking at a real carpenter. 
And whenever any one informs us that he has found a man 
who knows all the arts, and all things else that everybody 
knows, and every single thing, with a higher degree of accu- 
racy than any other man — whoever tells us this, I think that 
we can only imagine him to be a simple creature who is likely 
to have been deceived by some wizard or actor whom he met, 
and whom he thought all-knowing, because he himself was 
unable to analyse the nature of knowledge and ignorance and 
imitation. And so when we hear persons saying that the 
tragedians and Homer, who is at their head, know all the 
arts and all things human, virtue as well as vice, and divine 
things too, for that the good poet must know what he is 
talking about, and that he who has not this knowledge can 
never be a poet, we ought to consider whether here also 
there is not a similar illusion. Perhaps they may have been 
deceived by imitators, and may never have remembered when 
they saw their works that these were but imitations thrice 



1 The allusion is to bk. ix. p. 5 86 ff. 



2 6 



HISTORY OF /ESTHETIC. 



removed from the truth, and could easily be made without 
any knowledge of the truth, because they arc- appearances 
only, and not real substances? Or perhaps after all they 
may be in the right, and poets do really know the things 
about which they seem to the many to speak well? — Now do 
you suppose that if a person were able to make the original 
as well as the image, he would devote himself to the image- 
making branch ? Would he allow imitation to be the ruling 
principle of his life, as though he could do nothing better ? 

-The real artist who knew what he was imitating, would be 
interested in realities and not in imitations ; and would desire 
to leave as memorials of himself works many and fair ; and 
instead of being the author of encomiums, he would prefer to 
be the theme of them." 

Here we see the theory of imitation laid down in a definite 
metaphysical form, ostensibly as an annihilating criticism on 
the value and reality of art, though consisting in a simple 
formulation of the current conception regarding it. Three 
decisive points in the passage call for our notice. 

^Esthetic i. Art works with images only and not with 
:alities such as can act or be acted upon in the 



Semblance. 



P 



world of ordinary life. 

Relation to h- These images are not symbolic of the ulti- 
common Reality. nlal( . rea li tv as created by God; that is, in our 
language, of the relations and conditions which to a perfect 
knowledge' would be present as determining or constituting 
any real object in the order of nature. The appearances 
in which fine art consists are superficially imitative of the 
second or common-place reality which is relative to every-day 
purpose and sense-perception, 
inferiority by hi. The images of art must be judged — and 
this standard, therefore condemned — by their capacity of repre- 
senting common reality either with sensuous completeness or 
with intellectual thoroughness ; the reality is in every way 
preferable to the imitation, 1 and, it is added lower down, even 
beauty depends on a correct representation of use. 

Of these three characteristic assertions the first must be 
reserved for treatment under the head of aesthetic value. 
1 I ere we need only observe that it is fundamentally and abso- 
lutely true 



1 Plato, Rep., [). Go i. 



DUALISM IN PLATO AND ARISTOTLE. 



?7 



The second and third constitute the differentia of the non- 
aesthetic account of art natural to Hellas ; and till their 
contentions are fairly challenged and repudiated, we are safe 
in saying that no true aesthetic of representative or concrete 
art has been attained or is possible. For, so long as they are 
admitted, the standard of judgment lies ex hypothesi in the 
appearance and purposes of reality as accepted by every-day 
action and experience. 

Whether Plato is serious or consistent with himself in in- 
sisting that the relation of art is to the " second, 1 ' and not to 
the " first" reality, does not concern us here. It is sufficient 
to note that the essence of a mimetic theory could not be 
more trenchantly formulated than by this classification of 
realities, on the assumption which I believe to be indisputable, 
that Plato's first and highest reality has for us an intelligible 
meaning as practically corresponding to the completest con- 
ception in which, the order of nature can be presented to a 
human mind. 

It may occur to the reader that Aristotle, not holding to the 
metaphysical dualism so sharply expressed by Plato in the 
passage which has been quoted, was not under the necessity 
of repudiating the relation of art to common reality there laid 
down, so definitely as Plotinus afterwards repudiated it. Com- 
mon perceptible reality, it would then be alleged, contained 
for Aristotle the true real and universal, and therefore the 
dependence of art upon the former was not for him definitely 
separable from its dependence upon the latter. And hence, 
it might be urged, the refinements which we shall find in his 
theory and his criticism, are not mere practical qualifications 
of the old conception, forced upon him by increasing critical 
experience and closer observation of the healthy love of 
beauty, but are satisfactory evidence of a fundamental change 
of standpoint in the direction away from the mimetic and 
towards the symbolic art-consciousness. I believe, however, 
that such a view would be erroneous. In the first place, the 
difference between Plato and Aristotle in regard to philo- 
sophical dualism is not at all such as is commonly supposed, 
or such as the above passage from the Republic might lead a 
reader to imagine, w T ho is unacquainted with the varying and 
subtle gradations in which the so-called "doctrine of ideas'" 
presents itself throughout Plato's writings. The appearance 
of dualism is produced by efforts to apprehend the principle 



2S 



HISTORY OF /ESTHETIC. 



that the object is relative to the subject, and bearing this 
principle in mind we shall not find more than a difference in 
' degree between the metaphysical position of the two great 
philosophers. The distinction between reality for perception 
and reality for thought is essentially the same to both of them. 

And in the second place, if we add to the evidence above 
referred to regarding Aristotle's moralistic position that which 
has also been adduced with respect to his view on the effect 
of resemblance in comparison with that of reality, and if we 
observe the weak psychological qualification by which alone 
he limits this latter principle, 1 we cannot doubt that as 
a matter of fact Aristotle thoroughly adhered in metaphysical 
as in moral criticism to the conception of art as a mimetic 
representation of the world in the shape which it takes for 
normal action and perception, 
its jEsthetic i& This metaphysical estimate of image-making 
value. £ ne art> c l ose ly associated at least in Plato with an 
analogous psychological estimate of the imagination, although 
in form non-aesthetic, and profoundly hostile to the value of 
the poetic world, is in substance an important foundation- 
stone of aesthetic theory. 

JEsthetic sem- i. It is not sufficiently recognised that in the 
mance. Polemic of Republic, Book X., taken in con- 
junction with other well-known passages in Plato, there is laid 
down the essential doctrine of aesthetic semblance as plainly 
as in Schiller or in Hegel. The imputation of inferiority — that 
the appearance is superficial compared to the sensuous reality — 
is of merely transient importance in itself, but is of the highest 
significance as a phase of estimation through which the 
aesthetic appearance must naturally pass on its way to com- 
plete recognition as distinct from common-place fact. The 
double-edged nature of the phenomena of imitation now neces- 
sarily begins to reveal itself. "To imitate," means no doubt 
to produce a likeness of ; but what is a likeness ? In what 
medium does it exist ? Of what relations to practice and to 
reality is it capable ? To all these questions the criticism of 
naive metaphysic has its answers. A likeness is a projection 
or superficial reproduction of a real thing, in a medium in- 
capable of exhausting the content of the original reality, or 
of fulfilling the purposes or satisfying the interests which 



See ch. iv. 



ESTHETIC SEMBLANCE. 



attach to it. And art is constituted entirely of likenesses, and 
its mental medium is the imagination or image-receiving 
faculty. The censure of inutility which follows upon this 
trenchant distinction, by denying the naive conception of an 
adequate relation to reality, leads us to the recognition of an 
aesthetic interest which is not that of utility, nor .of relation to 
any satisfaction connected with the sensuous impulses. More- 
over, when Plato insists that the appearances employed by the 
artist are in relation not with the unseen world of thought and 
law, but with a lower reality which is itself only an image of 
that unseen world, it is impossible not to observe in this a 
strong though negative suggestion of the function of beauty 
as a svmbol for spiritual things. And indeed as regards 

/AO O 

beauty, though not as regards art, this suggestion even takes 
a positive form, when it is laid clown 1 that the Creator in 
making the world beautiful necessarily modelled it on the 
ultimate underlying order ; whereas anything modelled upon 
the created world itself, and therefore especially such presen- 
tations as those of art, must inevitably be devoid of beauty. 

There could not be a more definite challenge to subsequent 
reflection, which could hardly fail to ask, whether to reveal the 
beautiful in the deeper significance thus accorded to created 
things might not be the purpose and essence of art. 
e T ii. Besides enforcing the truth implied in the 

Semblance tn- . . o sr 

adequate to mimetic theory, Plato reduces to an absurdity its 
Reality. e l ement 0 f falsehood. This element, it must be 
remembered, he found expressed in the reflective opinion 
of his time, 2 just as he found an element of non-aesthetic in- 
terest in its artistic practice. All that he has to do, is to for- 
mulate the received opinion with perfect self-consistency, and 
draw the inference which immediately presents itself. Whether 
in his own mind he sympathized with that inference, I be- 
lieve that we can never know. If it were possible to con- 
jecture, on the basis of his general and less strictly scientific 
utterances, I should venture to think it possible that the pro- 
blem pressed upon him as one of fundamental importance : 
that the current Hellenic theory, within which he found himself, 
agreed only too well with some phenomena of existing art. 
and was profoundly unsatisfactory to the great thinker ; and 
that he therefore examined this theorv seriouslv, with the re- 



1 Timaus, 28 B. 



2 I.e. above, p. 25 



30 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



suit, 44 If, and in as far as, this is the true explanation of art, 
art has not the value which popular judgment assigns to it." 
The further suggestion, "There must be more in it than 
this," must no doubt have presented itself to him, as we can 
partly see, in various forms, with various degrees of explicitness 
and urgency. But his final utterance as a metaphysical 
theorist on representative art considered as imitation of reality, 
is in brief : "so far as the value of aesthetic appearance depends 
either upon its sensuous or upon its intellectual adequacy to 
natural and human reality so far it is a failure and does not 
merit the attention of serious men." That is to say, either 
artistic representation is worthless, or out of the conditions 
imposed and possibilities revealed by reproduction in the 
medium of appearance, there must be developed an aim and 
interest, other than the aim and interest presented by the 
reality which is represented. It should be added that al- 
though the conclusion as here stated and motived is absolutely 
just, yet there is also a minor question of true aesthetic in- 
volved in discussing the degree of the artist's actual know- 
ledge. Though his object is not to rival reality, but to seize 
its suggestions, he depends profoundly and increasingly on his 
knowledge of it, which Plato seems to us to under-estimate. 

The above negative result, together with the former and 
positive result that 44 Art has its being in appearance," not yet 
extended to the generalization "that beauty has its being in 
appearance," form the elements of permanent aesthetic value 
contained in the metaphysical principle upon which Hellenic 
theory concerning fine art is founded. 

^Esthetic 3- We now approach the consideration of the 

Principle. one tme esthetic principle recognised by Hellenic 
antiquity in general. This may be described as the principle 
^ that beauty consists in the imaginative or sensuous expression 
of unity in variety. 

I call this an aesthetic principle in contradistinction to the 
moralistic and metaphysical principles which we have hitherto 
been examining, because it raises no question of other attri- 
butes or relations in the beautiful object, such as conducive- 
ness to virtue, or degree of reality, nor does it involve the 
assumption which underlies such questions, that art is a mere 
reflection of nature ; but it does, directly and in general form, 
attempt a solution of the problem, "What is the nature of 
beauty as a characteristic of experienced presentations ? " 



FORMAL BEAUTY. 



31 



The Hellenic answer to such a question was necessarily 
formal. The reasons for which art appeared at first to be 
the mere reproduction of reality are also the reasons which 
prohibited aesthetic analysis from insisting on the concrete 
significance of what is beautiful in man and in nature. 

So long as common reality — the object of average percep- 
tion — is regarded as the standard of art, there is an insur- 
er . . . 

mountable barrier against the identification of beauty with the 
spiritual expressiveness which only a higher perception can 
apprehend. Or, in other words, to accept the imitation of 
nature in the widest sense as the function of art, is simply to 
state the problem of concrete beauty in the rudest manner 
possible, admitting a total inability to solve it. For to say 
that the material of beautiful presentation is in some way 
drawn from the objects of sense-perception does not touch the 
question, " What can art do more than nature ? " But when 
we ask in what respects, that is, in virtue of what general 
character or conditions, a reality, whether presented or repre- 
sented, is beautiful, then we have raised the specific question 
of aesthetic science. And to this a mimetic theory, for which 
one reality is, in strictness, as good a model as another, has 
ex hypothesi no answer. 

But there are simple cases and traits of beauty which either 
have nothing to do with the direct representation of life and 
nature, or are to be found in such representations merely as 
limiting conditions imposed by the same principles which con- 
stitute the entire content of the former and simpler cases of 
beauty. The analysis of these cases and characteristics is not 
barred by the mimetic theory, which has only a remote and 
metaphorical application to them. And although w T e asserted 
that for ordinary Greek life there was no unseen or spiritual 
world to which a sensuous presentation could be related as a 
mere symbol, yet the most general principles of action and 
knowledge soon became familiar to the intelligence of so 
gifted a race, and were naturally applied by its thinkers as 
spiritual principles to the analysis of such formal and abstract 
beauty as obviously did not consist in the reproduction of 
natural reality. 

In dealing w T ith a true aesthetic conception we need not, as 
before, separate the account of its application from the esti- 
mate of its aesthetic value. A review of the cases in which it 
is applied, beginning with the most general statements of its 



32 HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



range, forms the best criticism of the principle, which may be 
further elucidated at the close of this chapter by comparison 
with some modern researches. 

, c+ + a. The synthesis of the one and the many was, 

General State- J J 

ments in Ancient as we all know, the central problem and the cen- 
tral achievement of Greek philosophy. The con- 
ception of unity in variety is the indispensable basis of that 
idea of system or totality of interdependent parts, which was 
destined to be the structure erected by modern speculation 
upon the definite foundation laid by the Greek thinkers. 
The relation of whole to part — a slightly more concrete ex- 
pression for unity in variety — has never been more perfectly 
elucidated and more justly appreciated than by Plato and 
Aristotle, and it is in recognising the satisfaction afforded to 
the mind by the sensuous or imaginative embodiment of this 
relation that they make a first step in genuine aesthetic 
analysis. 

When we say with approval of a poem or of a musical 
composition, that it has a beginning, middle and end, we are 
probably not aware that we are repeating a principle which 
Aristotle, in dealing with the drama, after the precedent of a 
less explicit passage in Plato., 1 has defined with naive pro- 
foundness. "A tragedy 2 is a representation of a whole action 
— a whole is what has beginning, middle, and end. A begin- 
ning is what does not necessarily come after something else, 
but is so constituted as to have something else come after it ; 
an end, on the contrary, is what is so constituted as to come 
after something else but to have nothing after it ; and a 
middle is what is so constituted as to come after something 
else and also to have something else after it — for beauty 
depends upon size [so that the relation of the parts may be 
appreciable] and order." 

So, again, we may often hear about any beautiful object, " it 
would be impossible to add or take away the smallest part 
without spoiling it." This is genuine Greek aesthetic. "Just 
as," Aristotle says, 3 "in all other representative arts a single 
representation is of a single object, so the story [of a drama] 
being the representation of an action, must be of a single one, 
which is a whole ; and the parts of the scheme of incidents 
must be so arranged that if any part is transposed or removed 



1 Phczdriis, 2 68 D. See ch. iv. 2 Ar., Poet., vii. 1-4. 3 Poet., viii. 4. 



FORMAL BEAUTY. 



33 



the whole will be disordered and shattered ; for that of which 
the presence or absence makes no appreciable difference is do 
part of the whole." 

Moreover, the relation of the one, to the many or of the 
part to the whole is represented in comparative purity by 
geometrical figures, or again by rhythms or spatial intervals 
that bear numerical relation to one another. And for this 
reason Greek philosophy is inclined to select mathematical 
form, ratio, or proportion, as the pure and typical embodi- 
ment of beauty. 

" Now since the good and the beautiful are different (for the 
former is always a property of action, but the latter extends 
to objects free from motion), those are mistaken who affirm 
that the mathematical sciences say nothing of beauty or good- 
ness. For they most especially discern and demonstrate 
the facts and definitions relating to them ; for if they demon- 
strate the facts and definitions relating to them, though with- 
out naming the qualities in question, that is not keeping silence 
about them. The main species [elements ? elSij] of beauty are 
order, symmetry, definite limitation, and these are the chief 
properties that the mathematical sciences draw attention to." 1 

I subjoin a passage from Plato, to which reference will have 
to be made again. It is worth while to observe that almost 
all the actual material of Aristotle's thought, as distinct from 
the method of his treatment, may, as in this case, be discovered 
in Plato. " The principle of goodness has reduced itself to the 
law of beauty. For measure and proportion always pass into 
beauty and excellence." 2 

" I do not mean by the beauty of form such beauty as that 
of animals or pictures, which the many would suppose to be 
my meaning ; but, says the argument, understand me to 
mean straight lines and circles, and the plain and solid figures 
which are formed out of them by turning-lathes and rulers and 
measurers of angles ; for these I affirm to be not only relatively 
beautiful, like other things, but they are eternally and abso- 
lutely beautiful, and they have peculiar pleasures, quite unlike 
the pleasures of irritating an itching place (which has been 
taken above as the type of pleasure mixed with pain). And 
there are colours which are of the same character, and have 
similar pleasures. . . . When sounds are smooth and 



1 Ar., Metaph., 1078 a. 2 Philebus, marg., p. 64. 

D 



34 



HISTORY OF AESTHETIC. 



clear, and utter a single pure tone, then I mean to say they 
are not relatively but absolutely beautiful, and have a natural 
pleasure associated with them." 1 The exclusion of life and 
pictures of life, in this passage, from the realm of absolute beauty, 
to which regularity and unity are essential, is a striking case 
of the limitation which we have seen to be inherent in Greek 
aesthetics. The concrete individual unity which underlies the 
apparent disorder of the beauty of life was not likely to be 
appreciated until after the same principle had been recognised 
in the more abstract or formal cases and conditions of its 
embodiment. 

And it is plain that formal beauty, as recognised in such 
passages as these, of which all Greek philosophy is full, is 
constituted by a symbolic relation — a presentation to sense of 
a principle which is not sensuous. Such " presentation," in 
default of a more precise term, may sometimes be called an 
" imitation "; 2 but it is impossible to "imitate" a non- 
sensuous principle in a sensuous medium. 

particular fi> Of such symbolism or presentation we find 
cases. the following principal cases to have attracted the 
attention d? Plato or Aristotle. 

colour and i- There is no more obvious type of unity appeal- 
Tone. j n g to sense than is to be found in the self-identical 
quality of a colour extended in space or of a tone extended 
in time. These, as was shown in the passage quoted above 
from the Philebus, Plato recognised as beautiful, 3 and, accord- 
ing to the whole context of the passage and the expressions 
employed in describing the sounds in question, for the reason 
here suggested, namely as sensuous presentations of unity. 
Not, of course, that this is the reason apprehended by the 
subject whose enjoyment is being analysed. That would at 
once transfer beauty from perception to reflection. It is only 
suggested as the cause, observed and assigned by the theorist 
who is conducting the analysis ab extra. 

The same observation upon the beauty of pure colours and 
sounds as types of unity in diversity is made by Kant, and 
will have to be considered as a question of modern aesthetic. 
It is obvious that not only the facts of artistic perception, but 
the physical analysis furnished by science, throw a certain 
difficulty in the way of the explanation. For if "pure" means 



1 Philebus, marg., p. 51. 2 RepubL, iii. 400 A. 3 Cf., Timceus, 80 B. 



FORMAL BEAUTY. 



35 



unmixed, as Kant defines it to mean, are such pure sounds or 
colours, even if they can be said to exist at all, the most beau- 
tiful ? It will be found however that the explanation will 
maintain itself, though in a more subtle form than that 
suggested by Plato, or even by Kant. Mr. Ruskin's account 
of " Purity as the type of divine energy," 1 while solving the 
difficulties referred to, presents a wonderful analogy with the 
idea as it first dawned on Plato. 
Elementary & Elementary geometrical forms, even the 
^metrical straight line, and more particularly certain tri- 
angles, are set down as absolutely beautiful. 2 We 
have interpreted this to mean that they are among the purest 
examples of unity in the form of simple regular or symmetrical 
shape. 

Strange as this assertion may appear to our aesthetic per- 
ception, which demands a more varied and concrete revelation 
of order or unity, I do not think that it can justly be denied. 
There is a degree of beauty belonging to every shape or 
structure which in any way affects perception with a sense 
of regularity or symmetry, that is, of the unity of parts in a 
whole as it displays itself where the whole is lacking in highly 
concrete differentiation. 

And if we bear in mind that architecture and decorative 
ornament, of the severe though refined type congenial to 
Greek civilisation, fell outside the frontier of imitative repro- 
duction, we may better understand how a Greek theorist might 
be content with a plain curve as a type of beauty, and how 
such a type might really involve a degree of delightful refine- 
ment which later ages have not again attained by such simple 
means. Plato indeed is apparently contemplating such 
examples as the straight line and the circle ; whereas, if our 
experts may be trusted, these most abstract of shapes are 
replaced in Hellenic architecture and decoration by delicate 
curves due to the skilled eye and hand of the artist-workman. 
But this contrast would only show, what the whole history of 
aesthetic must illustrate, that theory follows but tardily after 
practice. 

In such cases as the above, although the principle of unity 
is presented under very different sensuous embodiments, yet 
they all agree in being highly abstract, and the principle 



1 Mod., Painters, vol. ii. 2 Philelus, I.e.. Timccus, I.e., Ar., Metaph,, La 



36 



HISTORY OF /ESTHETIC. 



therefore appears rather as their substance than as their limit- 
ing form. In any case we have here solid observations of 
aesthetic fact. If the explanation which Greek theory offers 
should appear inadequate, still it has done good service in 
drawing attention to these simple instances of beauty, which 
would in that case have to be dealt with on one or other of 
the two extreme views known respectively as Formal ^Es- 
thetic, and as the ^Esthetic of Feeling. 

We now turn to those cases in which the abstract principle 
of unity is plainly inadequate to the concrete significance of 
the content, and yet is the only aesthetic explanation of it 
which Greek theory could furnish. Here, then, organic 
unity though alleged to be the substance is in fact nothing 
more than the condition of beauty, 
simple song- lii- Plato's restriction of permissible music to 
music. very simple song-tunes of a severe type, although 
it has a moralistic aspect, is also a result and example of 
his genuine but inadequate aesthetic. The long discussion of 
music and metre in the third book of the Republic, in which 
the conception of unity that permeates the ideal common- 
wealth is repeatedly contrasted with the multiplicity and 
variety inherent in imitative or dramatic music, makes it plain 
that the simple song-tune is acceptable to Plato partly because 
he is able to formulate to himself its symbolic function as 
expressive of a principle which has profound import for the 
soul. The music which he rejects is partly indeed for him 
expressive of evil — and so far his rejection of it is moralistic 
and not aesthetic — but to a far greater extent its defect in his 
eyes consists in being concretely reproductive of natural 
reality, and therefore not expressive of ideas nor related to 
life in any way that he is able to comprehend. And his 
refusal on this ground to recognise such music as healthy art 
is a proof of genuine aesthetic insight. What has no expres- 
siveness is not beautiful. As a matter of fact very simple 
tunes 1 have an unrivalled capacity of symbolising elementary 
moods and ideas. Aristotle, following Plato, observes upon 
this phenomenon with results to which we shall have to 
return in the next chapter. 

EtMcai and iv. The extreme generality of the principle which 
Logical wholes. we are tracing in its applications produced a dan- 



1 Mr. L. Nettleship in Abbott's Hellenica, p. 118. 



THE BEAUTIFUL SOUL. 



37 



ger of confusion which Greek philosophy did not entirely 
escape. But we must not overrate the extent of this evil. 

It is true that we constantly find in Plato fine arts or their 
productions compared, in respect of systematic reasonableness, 1 
both with moral or political relations and with industrial or 
non-representative crafts. But we must bear in mind that 
this is an absolutely just comparison, so long as it only serves 
to insist upon the common character of organic unity by help 
of the pre-eminent examples which fine art affords. The 
comparison of a member in a political whole to a feature in a 
statue, 2 with regard to the subordination which is essential in 
the one case as in the other, is perfectly adequate for the 
purpose for which Plato employs it. And no one is entitled 
to accuse him of a confusion between morality and aesthetic 
because he compares right and beauty in a point in which 
they are fairly comparable. 

But although it is an error to charge Plato on this ground 
with introducing aesthetic ideas into ethical or logical reason- 
ings, yet there was one direction in which, owing to the 
generality of its principle, Greek aesthetic unquestionably 
cast its net too wide. 

Beauty, as we understand it, is only for sense and for 
sensuous imagination. The "beautiful soul" of modern 
romance appears to derive its appellation from a metaphor 
which indicates a certain directness of delight afforded by the 
contemplation of its spiritual qualities, analogous to the direct- 
ness of delight which attends the perception of sensuous 
beauty. 

Beauty of soul, or beauty in the supra-sensuous world, 
as recognised by Greek philosophy, 3 depends upon a some- 
what similar metaphor, enforced by a degree of failure in 
differentiating the unreflective traditional use of the term 
"beautiful" and therefore partaking of the nature of a 
confusion, although an expressive confusion. More espe- 
cially the notion of an intellectual conception or archetype 
of beauty such as itself to be beautiful, is a very serious mis- 
take in aesthetic. We should have hoped to find that beauty 
was regarded as essentially the sensuous expression — not of 
the beautiful, nor even of the good — but simply of the real. 



1 Republic, i. 349 D. 2 Republic, iv., init. 

3 Plato, Phcedrus, passim, and Ar., Rhet., 1366 A. 



38 



HISTORY OF AESTHETIC. 



This idea is plainly close at hand in the distinction between 
the beautiful and the good, but is destroyed by the co-ordina- 
tion of the two as equally archetypes in a supra-sensuous 
world. 

We must not however make the matter worse than it is. 
It is not the case that the principle of beauty, though in 
metaphorical passages spoken of as beautiful, was alleged to 
be the sole genuine beauty to the exclusion of the things of 
sense. Plato does not regard it as a mistake to believe in 
the beauty apparent to educated sense-perception ; on the 
contrary, both he and Aristotle make the acquisition of such 
perceptive capacity a main purpose of education. What he 
censures is not the belief in many beautiful things, but in 
many conflicting "beauties"; 1 that is, conflicting principles 
or standards of beauty. 

Tue Lesser Arts v. Granting however that the generality of the 
and relation of whole and part misled the Greeks 
orma lve . ma king their aesthetic theory too wide in 

one direction, it at least encouraged them not to make it too 
narrow in another. If they erred by including moral and 
mental qualities in beauty, they did not err, as modern philo- 
sophy has been apt to, by neglecting to notice the lesser arts 
and handicrafts as within the region of the beautiful. Al- 
though, as we have seen, the distinction between representa- 
tive and directly productive art was forcing itself into 
prominence in the fifth century B.C., yet no such contrast 
as that between art and industry had as yet entered into 
ordinary language ; and the profession, the trade, the craft, 
and the fine art, were all designated by the same term, and 
regarded alike as examples of reasonable systematic activity. 
And wherever such activity took form in objects that ap- 
pealed to sense-perception, there, for the Greek philosopher, 
the aesthetic sphere was entered. 

But with regard to the content to be expressed in their 
varied concrete shapes, from the works of architecture and 
decoration and the accompanying lesser crafts of life to the 
great independent formative arts of painting and sculpture, 
theory in Hellenic antiquity takes us no deeper than the 
analysis which seemed adequate for the beauty of a simple 

1 Republic, V. 479 D, " Ta twv 7roXXC)V 7roAAa i'6/xLjxa kclXov re Trepl kol twv 
aAAoov." 



EXPRESSIVE WORKMANSHIP. 



39 



curve, say, of a plain moulding, or of a single colour or tone. 
"And 1 all life is full of them," we read in the Republic, at 
the close of the discussion on music and metre before re- 
ferred to, "as well as every constructive and creative art — 
painting, weaving, embroidery, the art of building, the manu- 
facture of utensils, as well as the frames of animals and of 
plants ; in all of them there is grace 2 or the absence of grace." 
It is worth noticing that the beauty of animals and of plants 
is here mentioned in the same line with the beauty of various 
arts, showing how impossible it is to distinguish in any 
theoretical treatment between the direct perception or beauty 
of nature and the artistic perception or beauty of art. The 
limitation is remarkable as well as the inclusion. We find 
nothing about the mountains, or the sea, or the sky, and might 
have risked the suggestion that the forms of inanimate nature 
had not caught the eye of the Greek artist and critic, were 
it not for the magnificent sense of cloud movement, revealed 
without warning or sequel by Aristophanes. 3 Certainly how- 
ever the Greek expression for " painter" in the sense of artist 
— a painter of living things — is full of strange suggestiveness. 

In all this region of expressive workmanship, which we 
must judge not merely by its relics but by written records, 
aesthetic theory had nothing to point out but propriety of 
form ("grace"), rhythm, symmetry or balance. But in 
presence of concrete significance and expression all these 
ideas sink into postulates, that the relation of the unity to the 
diversity or of the whole to the part shall be right and just ; 
shall be, that is to say, whatever the individual import of the 
presentation may demand, subject to a general regard for the 
principle of systematic reasonableness as one that can never 
be neglected without loss in any sensuous or imaginative 
expression. Much as these postulates signified to the Greeks — 
whose splendid composition, we are told, distinguishes their 
commonest work 4 from that of all other beauty-loving men — 
they are in themselves, for aesthetic theory, mere abstract 
formulae or conditions, embodying only the fundamental fact 
that system is the first law of expression. 
Poetry and the vi. And even in reflecting upon the most 
Drama. profoundly human of all arts, upon poetry and 



1 Republic, Jowett's trans., marg., p. 401. 2 Eucrx^otrvi^. 

3 Clouds, 323 ff. 4 Lectures on Art, Poynter, p. 69. 



40 HISTORY OF /ESTHETIC. 



the tragic drama, Aristotle has little to say within aesthetic 
limits that does not flow from the postulated relation of part 
to whole. 1 We have seen how pregnantly he succeeds in 
treating this formal condition of art, and it would be wrong 
to depreciate the conception of dramatic unity and consistency 
which modern criticism inherited from him, and was long 
unable to appreciate in the full depth of its author's meaning. 

We have thus seen exemplified within the limits of Greek 
theory that relation between formal and individual expression 
which was embodied in our definition of the beautiful, and 
which also determines the direction of progress from ancient 
to modern aesthetic. 

In music and poetry, indeed, the relation did not lend itself 
to a simple demarcation between two regions of each of these 
arts, although it expressed ; tself in the difficulty of appreciat- 
ing their more complex torms. But within the limits of 
formative art the distinction is tolerably plain. Individual 
expressiveness emerges along with what the Greek calls 
" imitation," beginning above architecture and the non-repre- 
sentative lesser arts, with naturalistic as opposed to geometrical 
decoration, and becoming more and more concrete throughout 
the higher kinds of plastic art and painting in which the ab- 
stract conditions of reasonable expressiveness only continue to 
assert themselves as the principle of unity and composition. 
But Greek theory was necessarily unable to enrich its aesthetic 
analysis by the deeper spiritual content which a complete 
explanation of concrete beauty would have demanded, and 
therefore the Greek mind merely accepted the problem as one 
of " imitation," of somehow or other getting at reality, and 
supplemented its abstract aesthetic principle which it was 
unable to deepen by the immature ethical and metaphysical 
reflections which we have considered. And these, as we saw, 
have at least the merit of bearing witness to the perception 
of certain essential relations both positive and negative be- 
tween life and art, but do not contribute anything to strictly 
aesthetic investigation. 

1Jala .. . _ 4. I will conclude this chapter with an illus- 
Relation of For- ^. 1 r 1 i 

mai to concrete tration, drawn trom modern research, 01 the mode 
Beauty. Fecnner. degree in which the abstract conditions of 
expression are in themselves symbolic of ideal content, and 



1 Cf. Phcedrus, 268 D. 



THE GOLDEN SECTION. 



41 



are at the same time, in virtue of the abstract and universal 
nature of this content, related to more concrete utterance as 
form to substance. 

Assuming for the sake of argument that observation, as 
Fechner thinks, 1 bears out the idea that a certain type of 
rectangle is simply as a figure in space, and apart from any 
other known relations, more universally pleasant to the eye 
than any other rectangle, we seem compelled to suppose that 
it owes this property to some peculiar adequacy with which it 
embodies the general relation of part to whole — that is, to 
some unique symmetry or balance of its form. If it were 
possible to trace the alleged preference for the " golden- 
section " 'rectangle, which is the type in question, to some 
association with utility, this would make no difference to the 
present argument. An association which is sufficiently uni- 
versal to generate a preference that no one can discover to be 
biassed, is such as must be grounded in the nature of the 
object. In such a figure then we have an example of mathe- 
matically formal beauty. 

But further, many of the instances which have been 
examined by Fechner are rectangular picture-frames. Now 
here we at once come upon a possible conflict of principles. 
The preference for a golden-section rectangle, which depends 
upon its form alone, is plainly not of sufficient weight in 
determining the shape of a picture to counter-balance any 
requirements that may arise from the nature of the subject. 
It is not found that the same shape is thought appropriate to 
all easel pictures even when the shape is freely chosen ; 
while we know that almost any form of surface prescribed by 
an architect can be utilised with success by a master of pictorial 
composition. 

But yet it must suggest itself, as a matter of pure theory, 
that in a rectangular picture, a striking deviation from the 
rectangle which has most beauty on its own merits must 
entail a loss of expressiveness, which is no doubt readily 
compensated by the gain of higher elements of content, but, 
if quite wantonly incurred, would in its degree be a defect. 



1 Fechner, Vorschule der sEsthetik, 190 ff. 

2 A rectangle formed according to the golden section is a figure determined 
by a ratio of its sides such that the less is to the greater as the greater to the 
sum of the two. This ratio is roughly satisfied by 8 : 13, or 21 : 34. 



42 



HISTORY OF AESTHETIC. 



I do not now propose to discuss the more subtle manifesta- 
tion of the same principle of unity in the composition of the 
picture itself. My purpose was only to give a perfectly plain 
example of the relation in which the most formal element 
of beauty, having in itself a real though scanty substantive 
import, stands to the concrete revelation of spiritual insight 
which is clothed in natural shapes. In Stothard's picture of 
the Canterbury Pilgrims, for example, the shape of the canvas 
draws its justification from the necessities of the subject, and 
very obviously sacrifices the slight superficial beauty of the 
golden-section rectangle. Whether such a sacrifice can be 
compensated so as not after all to be a sacrifice is a question 
which will return upon us in modern aesthetic. The point 
which we are now endeavouring to make clear is that formal 
symmetry and concrete significance are not two heterogeneous, 
elements of beauty, but are related purely as abstract and 
concrete. The next chapter will be devoted to tracing the 
advance towards a more thorough theory made by the Greek 
mind, at first within the outlines which have now been de- 
scribed, and ultimately passing beyond them. 



CHAPTER IV. 



SIGNS OF PROGRESS IN GREEK THEORY CONCERNING THE 

BEAUTIFUL. 

iSitSSes *• We saw ° m t ^ ie ^ ast chapter but one that 
poetic art in Hellas was encountered by the 
earliest reflective criticism with a decided hostility, which was 
only the most primitive form of a misapprehension essentially 
involved in Hellenic thought. It is clear that Plato was alive 
to the existence of this critical antagonism, which his own 
views reproduced with a deeper significance. The object of 
the present chapter is to point out in their actual succession 
the most important changes by which the naive standpoint of 
Hellenic speculation upon beauty is at first modified ; paving 
the w T ay for those by which, in the dawn of a later period, it 
is altogether transformed. 

The cardinal points which determined Greek theory must 
now be considered with reference to three antitheses, which 
correspond to the content of the three principles discussed in 
the last chapter. The antithesis of imitation and symbolism 
corresponds to the metaphysical principle, the antithesis of 
real interest and aesthetic interest to the moralistic principle, 
and the antithesis of abstract and concrete analysis to the 
aesthetic principle. 

Each of these antitheses expresses a contrast between the 
Hellenic point of view and that of later times, and therefore 
indicate a direction in which modification became apparent 
even within the classical mode of thought. By keeping in 
view these leading contrasts it may be possible to preserve a 
degree of unity in tracing the process of modification through 
the speculation of successive thinkers. 

The pre- 2. The later pre-Socratic philosophers may be 

socratics. mentioned with reference to the first antithesis 
only. We observed among them a hostility to imaginative 
art arising from a naive conception of its relation to reality ; 
but they also show traces of the opposite and equally one- 



44 



HISTORY OF AESTHETIC. 



sided conception of art as allegory. The interpretation of 
Homer by the ascription of hidden meanings (yirovoia) was a 
familiar phenomenon to Plato, and is ascribed by later tradi- 
tion to the school of Anaxagoras. At any rate the mytho- 
logical phraseology of Heraclitus and Empedocles obviously 
leads up to such a conception, although it would be unhis- 
torical to suppose that the Erinyes, 1 or Hephaistos, or Strife, 
or Friendship were for these philosophers as they would be 
in similar speculation to-day, names consciously drawn from 
the mere analogy of a different sphere, for agencies known to 
be purely physical. It is plain that in the allegorical interpre- 
tation of the time just preceding Plato, and in writings kin- 
dred with allegory, such as the fable, the artificial myth, and 
the scientific epos, the crude idea of imitation was supple- 
mented by a reaction which itself fell into the opposite and 
hardly less crude extreme. For in allegory the reflective 
meaning and the sensuous embodiment are not fused into 
one, but are clearly distinguished, running in separate though 
parallel lines. Thus the allegorical expositions of Homer 
seem to have been directed to break the force of moralistic 
criticism, by reducing the content of the poems to a bald 
scheme of abstract truths. 

Allegory, therefore, is in its essence defective symbolism — 
symbolism in which form and content are at bottom indifferent 
to one another — and its presence whether in criticism or in 
production at this early period reveals a discontent with the 
limits of 11 imitation " together with an incapacity to grasp 
the nature of concrete symbolism. 

can the 3* Assuming that the Socrates of the Memora- 

invisibie be bilia may be treated, comparatively speaking:, as 

Imitated? , i • • i o t • i • r 

the historical bocrates, 1 notice two points oi 
interest in his recorded ideas. 

«. It is exceedingly remarkable with reference to the first 
antithesis that he directly raises 2 the question ''Whether the 
invisible can be imitated." The invisible to which he refers 
consists of mental moods, such as good and bad temper, and 
these, he is reported to have argued in discussion with Parrha- 
sinus, can be rendered by means of the expression of the face, 



1 " If the sun leaves his path, the Erinyes, allies of justice, will find him 
out." — Heraclitus, Ritter and Pr. no. 37. 

2 Xen., Memo?'., iii. 10. 



45 



and more particularly through the look of the eyes. It is also 
remarkable that he lays stress on the artistic expression of 
vitality. 1 Although these suggestions do not profoundly 
modify the idea of imitative representation — for common 
usage would quite allow that anger is through its effects an 
object of sense-perception, yet the formulation " Is the unseen 
imitable ? " is at least suggestive ; and the demand for 
" expression " in pictorial art is an important anticipation of 
later theory. The view of Socrates as to the capacity of 
painting is not quite in agreement with that of Aristotle, 
which it appears to have suggested by opposition. 

It may be added that the necessity for something more 
than sheer imitation is recognised by him through the crude 
conception of gathering together, from different originals, 
elements of beauty which nowhere exist in combination. In 
so early a period this idea is interesting, because it shows the 
consciousness that art needs in some way to bring a deeper 
insight to bear upon reality than untrained perception can 
supply. As a formal theory in later times it is simply 
tedious, being obviously no more than the first uncriticised 
shape of a very simple postulate. 
iEsthetic and ft- The attitude of Socrates to the question, 
Real interest, u j_[ as a beautiful thing as such a real interest ? " 
that is, an interest relative to a practical or to an appetitive 
purpose, is so far as we know uncritical, although the course 
of his thought may remind us of a feature in that of Kant. 
He refused, so we are told, to contemplate the possibility that 
beauty could exist except as relative to a purpose. To us, 
such relativity appears to destroy the aesthetic point of view, 
and the conception of beauty. It is well however to re- 
member how naturally the postulate of reasonable system, 
which is the fundamental aesthetic requirement, takes shape 
in the conception of teleological relativity. The addition 
suggested by Kant when he describes beauty as the character 
of adaptation to a purpose without relation to an actual 
purpose is probably a very fair gloss on the immature idea of 
relative beauty. Both Plato and Aristotle are in advance of 
the Socratic standpoint in this respect. 

1 The way in which these qualities are led up to in Xen., I.e., as something 
beyond o-v/x/xerpta and xP^ a leaves no doubt in my mind that Plotinus, in 
whom the sequence of terms is exactly the same, was much indebted to this, 
passage in the Memorabilia. 



46 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



4. It is hard to elicit much of definite historical 
pythagoreamsm. f r0 m the traditions that refer to early Pytha- 
goreanism. It seems certain, however, on the authority of 
Aristotle that philosophers known as Pythagoreans had pur- 
sued mathematical investigations with success, but had inter- 
preted some of their results after the manner of mysticism. 
It is also definitely asserted that the numerical relations of the 
musical scale were discovered by them. 

a. With reference to the antithesis between 
symbolism. j m j tat j on anc [ symbolism, the habit of a mystical 
interpretation of numerical relations and also the habit of refer- 
ring musical effects to mathematical relations, opened a wide 
pathway of escape from the idea of common sensuous reality 
as ultimate standard and original. 1 More especially, such 
investigations no doubt influenced the view on which Plato 
and Aristotle, we shall find, were substantially agreed as to the 
pre-eminent moral import of music. 

According to Aristotle 2 the Pythagoreans actually treated 
number as the original of which things were " imitations," an 
expression which Plato superseded, so Aristotle continues, by 
the phrase " participation " ; meaning that they exist by par- 
ticipation in abstractions and not as representations of them. 
This shows us how boldly the term " imitation " was capable 
of being applied, but also that Plato was inclined on the 
whole to introduce a somewhat greater strictness into the 
usage. 

Passing over the second antithesis /3, which does not concern 
us here, w r e may notice that — 

concrete 7- The genesis of aesthetic criticism, through a 

Analysis. rea ] hope and conviction that the principle of unity 
could be applied in the analysis of shape, rhythm, melo- 
dies, organic existences, was due in great measure to the pros- 
pect opened up by the progress of geometrical science and of 
elementary mathematical acoustics. The idea that a musical 
effect or symmetrical figure could be shown to owe its charm 
to a mathematical relation, having itself, probably, a further 
significance more or less justifiably imputed to it, plainly ani- 
mated the scientific imagination much as the physical theory 
of light and sound has animated it in the present day. 

Plato's 3 account of the science of "harmony," analogous, I 



1 See Timmis, p. 80. 2 Metaph., A. 5 and 6. 3 Republ, vii. 530 ff. 



SYMBOLISM IN PLATO. 



47 



presume, rather to acoustics than to counterpoint, and of the 
different classes of students who pursue it, some of them 
experimentalists and some mathematicians, shows that the 
attempt at detailed analysis of musical effect was no new 
thing, and his own suggestions were obviously encouraged by 
the consciousness of a scientific movement in the direction. 
However mystic might be its accessory ideas, still the enthu- 
siastic conviction that form and number underlie the structure 
of the universe imparted a comprehensiveness and audacity to 
critical analysis such as, on a very different plane of actual 
knowledge, characterises modern speculation. It must be 
borne in mind that the 5th and 4th centuries B.C. were a 
period of genuine advance in mathematical theory. The life 
of Euclid falls about the close of the 4th century, and the 
knowledge embodied in his Elements of Geometry was grow- 
ing up, partly by the researches of the " Pythagoreans," 
through the previous two hundred years. We may mention 
in this context the tradition that a canon, or rule of abstract 
proportions, was embodied by Polycleites in his statue of the 
Doryphoros. 1 Enquiry into proportional relations is one 
thing, the substitution of an abstract rule for creative percep- 
tion in art is another. It is not at all impossible however 
that the two were confused, as is constantly the case in the 
theory of practical men, and that thus the analysis of an 
abstraction was made to do duty for the analytic criticism of 
concrete expressiveness. 

In Plato we see both the completed system 
Plato. . . . . r . 1 • i 

ot Greek theory concerning art, and, side by side 

with this, the conceptions that were destined to break it down, 
symbolism °" When we found that the idea of symbolism, 
that is, of the embodiment of invisible realities in 
sensuous form, is conspicuous by its absence from Plato's ex- 
plicit theory of representative art, our conclusion ought to have 
excited some surprise. For, in the growing rebellion against 
a natural monism, fostered by abstract science on the one 
hand, and by abstract mysticism on the other, Plato appeared 
as the prophet of a dualism between nature and intelligence, 
or sense or spirit, which might be said to have had the effect 
of turning the whole perceptible universe into a symbol of 
ideas. It is difficult not to suppose that later European 



1 Overbeck, Schriftquellen, 953 ff. 



48 HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



theology, to which fine art became so profoundly related, has its 
ultimate source in the great simile of the Republic by which 
v the Sun and its light are conceived as the offspring and sym- 
bol of the absolute good and its manifestation or utterance. 
And in a somewhat different arrangement of the same scheme, 
the only-begotten universe of the Timceus, the god perceptible 
to sense, who is the image of the ultimate reason, also sug- 
gests ideas which were destined to become for centuries the 
principal content of symbolic imagination. 

But by Plato himself this connection was not established, 
v Images and imagination, for him, rank below nature and 
science. What he cares about, as every sympathetic student 
must feel, is reality at first-hand ; and the generalization that 
representative art is reality at second-hand is still fresh and 
serious in his mind. 

Thus the conceptions from which a new symbolic art was 
one day to spring do not coalesce with his theory of the rank 
and aim of artistic creation. 

This need not be less true even if the Platonic myths are 
genuine works of poetic imagination. No one doubts that 
the great art of Hellas in fact contained a symbolic element ; 
but our inquiry deals mainly with the conscious theory of it, 
and on this the artistic creations of the theorist himself throw 
little more light than any other works which might be known 
to him. But although the myths are by no means pure 
allegories, they are rather allegorical than symbolic. They 
are hot exactly fables like those of ^Esop, nor apologues like 
Prodicus' Choice of Herakles, but they resemble these stories 
in being subservient to conveying abstract ideas, the pictorial 
embodiment of which is expressly admitted to be indifferent. 
" A man of sense ought not to say," the Platonic Socrates 
concludes the great myth of the Phaedo, " nor will I be too 
confident, that the description which I have given of the soul 
and her mansions is exactly true." Poetry, in the strict 
sense, cannot distinguish so coolly between the content and 
the form. 

Thus we can hardly admit that the myths are genuine 
examples of symbolic art ; we should rather look for such art 
as this in the simple human drama of the dialogues, in their 
pathos, humour, and portraiture. But this, as has been im- 
plied, throws no real light on Plato's theory of beauty. 

It is important however to note that Plato was familiar 



PROGRESS IN PLATO. 



49 



with the idea of allegorical interpretation. 1 But this, as his 
good sense rejected such a method of arriving at the meaning 
of great poets, seems rather to have indisposed him towards 
a spiritual interpretation of art than to have recommended 
such a conception to his mind. 

On the other hand we may observe in Plato a few distinct 
theoretical deviations from the doctrine which restricts repre- 
sentative art to the imitation of commonplace reality. 

Formal Beauty. L Enou g h was sa ^> in tne last chapter, of the 

general analysis of formal beauty as embodying 
the principle of unity. This analysis was applicable, in Plato's 
mind, to all arts and crafts as well as to natural objects, and 
he actually employs the word " imitation" to express their 
embodiment of spiritual ideas in sensuous form. 3 

Musical ii. In the case of music this is especially re- 
symboiism. ma rkable to a modern reader, and when we are 
told 3 that certain rhythms, and, apparently, certain melodies, 
are " imitations " of certain types of life or temper, we feel 
that the limit between the image and the symbol is over- 
stepped. No doubt it was only very simple music which had 
for him this distinct expressive capacity, and it is not difficult 
to trace in his discussion a transition from the idea of repro- 
ducing in narrative such tunes or songs as a man of a certain 
character would willingly use, i.e. an imitation in pari materia, 
of sound by sound, to the consideration of the tune or rhythm 
reproduced in its direct relation to the mood of the man 
whose feelings it expresses. 

# We shall see that Aristotle goes still further in the same 
direction. 

Beauty which llL ^ ls a ^ so worth remembering that outside 
thau?ormai -^ atos definite theory of art the beautiful is princi- 
pally spoken of as the manifestation of intelligence, 4 
and the idea of poetic inspiration which earlier literature had 
possessed, and which the criticism of imitation had perhaps 
unduly thrust aside, is adopted by him with varying degrees 
of irony, 5 but always, probably, with a sound psychological ^ 
insight that the creative and critical genius are distinct, and 
that the apprehension of truth which belong to creative imagi- 
nation is other than that which proceeds by methodic reason. 



1 Republic, 378 D. 2 R e p u bii^ 

iii. 401. 3 Republic, iii. 400 B and D. 
4 Cratylus^ 416. * Phccdrus, 245 A; Laws, 719 C; Meno, 99 D. 

E 



5o 



HISTORY OF /ESTHETIC. 



But these suggestions were not reconciled with the general 
explanation of representative art, and the poet and artist rank 
in Plato's eyes many degrees 1 below the true lover of beauty, 
who is on a level with the philosopher. Thus it has even 
been maintained that for Plato fine art falls outside the pro- 
vince of the beautiful. 2 We have already seen under what 
limitations this assertion is true. He recognised that in fact 
the expression of ideal contents was especially noticeable in 
the works of man, but his theory of representation prevented 
him from founding upon this observation any definite notion 
of the beautiful as revealed more especially in art. 

iEsthetic /3. Estimation of beauty according to a practical 
interest. interest is as we saw equally unaesthetic, whether 
the interest is moral or sensuous. Not that pleasure, in the 
ordinary sense of the term, as descriptive of pleasant feeling, 
indicates an unaesthetic interest ; for in saying that we mean 
a thing to afford pleasure w T e only say that we mean it to 
please ; and the question now raised is more concrete than 
this, and the answer depends upon whether the pleasure is 
expected to arise from the sheer expressive effect of the 
aesthetic appearance, or from purposes or associations con- 
nected with the existence of the real objects of which that 
appearance reminds us. 

Therefore we must not look for Plato's attitude towards 
true aesthetic interest in the contrast which he too frequently 
draws between art which has for its object to give pleasure, 
and art which might have for its object to produce moral im- 
provement. Although, as we saw in the last chapter, 3 the 
demand of early criticism for moral elevation in art implies a 
sound judgment on the substantive relation of beauty to life, 
yet when we are estimating the progress of aesthetic theory 
proper, we must not recognise moral improvement as an 
aesthetic interest any more than the pleasures of vice. It is 
rather within the region of pleasurable presentation, as con- 
ceived by Plato, and in the contrast between pure and impure 
modes and conditions of such presentation, that we must look 
for something corresponding to the antithesis which we have 
in mind. 

But this contrast again is apt to be presented in a way 
which does not directly answer our question. Pure pleasures, 



1 Phcedrus, 248 E. 2 Schasler, i. 89. 3 Cf. also Nettleship in Helle?iica. 



BEAUTY AND PLEASURE. 



51 



such as according to Plato arise from true beauty, are free, no 
doubt, from selfish interest in the bad sense of the words ; thus 
much is clear ; but whether they are distinct from the plea- 
surable side of the nobler real affections and volitions is often 
by no means clear. Impure pleasures, again, are full of sen- 
suous, and even of painful or uneasy interest ; but whether 
they are separated from the pleasures of true beauty because 
they are relative to real desires (as morality also is), or be- 
cause qua pleasures they are disfigured by uneasiness, or only 
in so far as they are conceived to be of an immoral type — 
this is by no means plain. 

We may take as extreme examples of Plato's leanings in 
these two directions, first the above-quoted passage from the 
Philehis 1 relating to the beauty of form or unity; and secondly 
that in the Gorgias dealing with musical and tragic art, 
through an ironical comparison of them with the routine — 
denied to be an art — of cookery. 2 For instance, " and to what 
does their solemn sister [sister of choric and dithyrambic 
poetry, musical execution has also been mentioned], the won- 
drous muse of tragedy, devote herself? Is all her aim and 
desire only to give pleasure to the spectators, or does she fight 
against and refuse to speak of their pleasant vices, and willingly 
proclaim in word and song truths w r elcome and unwelcome ? 
Which is her character ? 

" There can be no doubt that Tragedy has her face turned 
towards pleasure and gratification. 

"And is not that the sort of thing which we were just now 
describing as flattery ? " 

In the Philehis it is assumed, and in the Gorgias implicitly 
denied, that pleasure is at least an essential element of 
the characteristic impression for which beauty ought to be 
valued. But in the passage in which this is assumed, the 
pleasure in question is strictly limited with reference : i. To the 
kind of sense-perception which can give rise to it — the per- 
ceptions of eye and ear only, with a doubtful inclusion, on a 
lower level, of the sense of smell ; and, ii. To the cases in wmich 
these sense-perceptions can give rise to the characteristic 
pleasures of formal beauty ; cases that are free from the un- 
easiness of desire, and, as above explained, are distinguished 
by their symbolic character. 



1 See p. 33, supra. 2 Gorgias, pp. 501, 502, 



52 



HISTORY OF AESTHETIC. 



The demarcation between the aesthetic and . non-aesthetic 
senses, strongly insisted on in the Hippias Major 1 which, if 
spurious, is interesting as showing a growth of definite ideas 
on this point, is a fair indication that the boundary between 
aesthetic and non-aesthetic interest is coming into view. 
Negatively, the " theoretic senses" are not connected with 
material consumption of the thing perceived, and positively, 
they and no others, with the doubtful exception of touch and 
muscular sense, have the capacity for the recognition of struc- 
tural totality, the first condition, as we have seen, of the ex- 
pressiveness in which beauty consists. The doubtful inclusion 
of smell most emphatically illustrates the genesis of the dis- 
tinction in Plato's mind. If we judge by "purity" in Plato's 
peculiar meaning, viz. as freedom from the intermittent un- 
easiness of desire, the pleasures of smell are pure ; if we judge 
by purity in the sense of significant unity or concentrated 
energy as revealed in the expressive character of a presenta- 
tion, 2 the pleasures of smell are not pure, but are as a rule 
mere occurrences in the way of pleasurable sensation. 

If then, in the passage from the Gorgias referred to, the 
fault ascribed to art were nothing more than that what it 
aims at and generates is pleasure, we should find a discrepancy 
between the two passages. But the aim ascribed and con- 
demned in the Gorgias is pleasure as suck, which means, as 
Plato seems rightly to insist with all his force, pleasure at any 
price and in anything. 3 " Cookery," he says (it is cookery 
with which poetry and music are being ironically compared, 
as equally forms of "flattery," i.e. mere provision of the 
pleasant) " in attending upon pleasure never 7'egards either the 
nature or reason of that pleasure to which she devotes her- 
self 'nor ever considers nor calculates anything." This com- 
parison shows that the satisfaction of real desire is not far 
from Plato's mind as the ground to be alleged against the 
nobleness of the concrete arts. It is exceedingly suggestive 
that in order to carry out this comparison he proposes to 
divest poetry of its poetic form, and consider simply its 
matter, that is, to change it from art into something else. 
But he does not name this ground, and passes on to the old 



1 Hipp. Major, 297-8. 

2 See Ruskin's Modern Painters, vol. ii. 3 on Purity. 

3 Gorgias, 501 A., Jowett. 



THE LOVE OF THE BEAUTIFUL. 



53 



antithesis of pleasure-giving as an aim, contrasted with moral 
improvement, so that he himself actually approves as the pur- 
pose of art not an aesthetic but a real, i.e. a moral interest. 

The conclusion must be that Plato has a clear view of 
aesthetic as distinct from real interest only in so far as he recog- 
nises a peculiar satisfaction attending the very abstract mani- 
festations of purely formal beauty. In those concrete forms of 
representation which we think the higher arts, he was unable 
to distinguish the pleasure of expressiveness from the practical 
interest of morality, which he desired to see predominant, and 
from the pleasure of realistic suggestion which he utterly 
condemned. 

This view of Plato's meaning is not, in my judgment, to be 
very seriously impugned on the ground of the noble account, 
several times repeated in the dialogues, of beauty as the object 
of educated love. 1 The question is whether the feeling for 
beauty so described is to be understood as a real enthusiasm 
for an idea, or even for a person sublimed into an idea, — an 
enthusiasm such as demands the reality or realization of its 
object — or as an ideal delight in a perfectly concrete sensuous 
appearance which charms as an appearance only. A pure affec- 
tion for a good and attractive friend, or an enthusiasm for the 
cause of order or of knowledge, is likely to be attended by 
refined perceptions, but it is not in itself the same thing as a 
feeling for beauty. Again, a delight in the expressive force 
of perfectly concrete fancies or appearances independent of 
the real practical existence of the objects corresponding to 
them, can hardly indeed exist except in a mind of large and 
noble purposes, but is not in itself an affection for any actual 
person, or enthusiasm for any actual cause. If Plato's 
"beauty" is an abstract purpose or principle, his "love of 
beauty " is a refined enthusiasm for real purposes or principles ; 
if his " beauty " is a value or import felt in the world of sense- 
perception when taken simply as expressive and not as a 
means to any end, then, and then only, his love of beauty is 
an aesthetic delight not concerned with the real existence of 
its objects. 

It is plain that both these elements enter into the Platonic 
love-philosophy, and that they are not as a rule distinguished. 
The former belongs to abstract and the latter to concrete 



Symposium ; Rep., iii. ; Phsedrus. 



54 



HISTORY OF .ESTHETIC. 



idealism ; for if beauty is out of the sensuous world, it is un- 
distinguishable from the object of will and knowledge ; while 
if it is in the sensuous world, it belongs to a perfectly definite 
sphere of appreciative perception. Plato's thought undoubt- 
edly alternated between these two extremes. What we have 
to bear in mind is that moral purity in the purpose of art or 
beauty does not constitute aesthetic purity, though moral 
impurity in the purpose of art or beauty does constitute 
aesthetic impurity. 

It is further worth remarking that Plato had observed 
the special connection between imagination and emotion, 1 and 
was not wholly unaware that free utterance of passion 2 might 
bring relief and calm, and again that the representative arts 
might be contrasted with the practical arts as play 3 with 
earnest. This latter conception, invested with profound 
import in modern times by the genius of Schiller, is in Plato 
a natural accompaniment of the view which makes the repre- 
sentation an inferior species of the reality, as when we say 
contemptuously of a dilettante that he is only playing at work. 
Yet this, like so much of the groundplan of Plato's thought, 
was full of possibilities which only needed a larger experience 
of spiritual needs and achievements to become realities. 

concrete 7. The last observation calls upon us to notice 
criticisms, fae i mmense substantive contribution made by 
Plato to the material for a true concrete criticism. For real 
advance in the theory of a great subject it is less important 
that a thinker's verdicts should be unimpeachable than that 
he should have gathered into a connected whole the right 
kind of experience and treated it in a way that suggests the 
most important issues. 

Plato has sketched the fabric of aesthetic experience on a 
coherent plan, which subsequent history has proved to be in 
accordance with the nature of the phenomena. He left to 
those who came after him the definite conception that there 
is a group of representative or imaginative arts consisting in 
chief of sculpture, painting, music, and poetry, with the 
addition of architecture and its auxiliary handicrafts, which 
are united with one another at least by a common difference 
from the merely useful productive trades, and the value of 
which presents a problem to those who care for the highest 



1 Rep., x., 606 D. 



2 Laws, 790. 



3 Laws, 889. 



DATA AS LEFT BY PLATO. 



55 



concerns of life. The chief points of view under which Plato 
attempted to penetrate the significance of these phenomena 
have already been set forth. It only remains to state that 
in spite of the abstract limitations within which he worked 
the mass of experience to which he called attention was such 
as to lay a sound foundation for a more concrete criticism 
than his own. He gave a raison d ctre to the distinction of 
epic, lyric, and dramatic poetry, not in itself new, by analysis 1 
turning on their respective degrees of dramatic personifica- 
tion ; he pointed out that a tragedy is an organic whole, 2 and 
not a string of speeches expressive of various morals ; he 
made an attempt of which the import is largely lost to us, 
but the suggestion is still valuable, to determine the ethical 
and symbolic affinities of metres melodies and other features 3 
of the vocal and instrumental music of his day ; he pointed 
out, though primarily as a proof of remoteness from reality, 
that the painter's third dimension 4 is ideal and not actual ; he 
insisted, as we have seen, on a symbolic value, though only 
of a very abstract and simple kind, as shared by all the 
formative handicrafts including architecture, with the more 
elaborate representative arts, and explained it more especially 
in the case of geometrical figures and simple tones and colours. 
The mere distinction, which was mentioned just above, of the 
aesthetic from the non-aesthetic senses, bequeathed to later 
philosophy a problem of extreme interest and difficulty, while 
the place assigned to beauty in education bears witness to the 
philosopher s practical feeling for it as the sensuous repre- 
sentative of reason, and has recently revived as one of the 
profoundest guiding ideas of modern life. 

Thus Plato's philosophic instinct enabled him to gather and 
organize an experience which suggested far more than was 
included in his abstract aesthetic theory, and to set the pro- 
blems which only a more concrete criticism could solve. 

6. It is needless to enter at length into the twice- 

Aristotie. fca j e Q £ ^ g enera ] re l a ti 0 n in which Aristotle 

stood to Hellenic life and thought. If there never was a 
greater intelligence, certainly no intelligence had ever a nobler 
opportunity. In the sphere of realized beauty with which we 
are here concerned, not only had the greatest works already 



1 Rep.y i-iii. 3. 

3 Rep.^ i-iii. ■ Timaus, 80 B. 



2 Phcedrus, 268. 
4 Rep., x. 



56 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



been produced, and attained complete recognition, 1 but an 
after-prime had subsequently set in, the nature of which could 
not fail to stimulate theoretical reflection. And for this re- 
flection the material was not only complete, but had been in 
great part organized by the thought of Plato. Thus to the 
greatest of originators there succeeded the greatest of investi- 
gators. 

a. First, then, in conformity with our previous 
symbolism, j^^od, we are to inquire how far Aristotle may 
have modified the essential Hellenic idea that only such reality 
as pleases in ordinary experience is that by the reproduction 
of which fine art hopes to please ; how far, in other words, the 
differentia " imitative," which he does not discard from the 
definition of art, retains for him its natural meaning of copying 
something which is such that it can be copied. Does 
" imitation" in Aristotle lean at all to " symbolism " ? 
selection of i- It is important that we should notice what 
Phenomena, esthetic phenomena chiefly attracted his atten- 
tion. In /Esthetic, as in other branches of philosophy,. 
Aristotle is the earliest writer to leave us a separate treatise. 
But its title of Poetic confines its immediate subject matter 
to literature, and. within literature to the art of invention or 
composition, usually though not necessarily in verse, of which 
three principal kinds, Epic, Tragedy, and Comedy, formed the 
heads of the discussion. Music is alluded to only as an incident 
of poetry. The arts of acting and of the rhapsode are referred 
to as essentially outside the arts of drama and epic respec- 
tively ; so that although these classes of poetry are considered 
throughout with reference to the feelings of an audience or 
of spectators, yet we are not wrong in saying that they are 
essentially treated as literature. Lyrical poetry has as yet no 
single name, and is not recognised as a species. Formative art, 
including Architecture and the lesser decorative crafts, fall 
outside the scope of the treatise, although painting is alluded 
to more than once by way of illustration. Observations upon 
music and painting occur in other writings ; but there is no- 
systematic inquiry into the pleasure arising from these arts. 
Aristotle's treatment of the subject is therefore not co-extensive 



1 As in the law of Lycurgus providing that statues of the three great 
tragedians should be erected, and that correct MSS. of their dramas should 
be prepared and preserved. 



IMITATION INNATE. 



57 



with the philosophy of Fine Art. How far such a philosophy 
can be gathered from him will appear as we proceed. 

But if his selection of phenomena is baulking to our 
curiosity, which would have welcomed his criticism of the 
Parthenon pediment-sculpture or of the Phigaleian frieze, it is 
eminently favourable to advance in aesthetic science. For it 
is most particularly the poetry of Hellas that we cannot 
possibly reconcile with the formal aesthetic theory natural to 
Greek thought, which finds some justification in its monu- 
mental sculpture and its temple architecture. In technical 
language, an inquiry into Greek epic, tragedy, and comedy^ 
must at least include elements belonging to the aesthetic 
theory of the sublime and the ugly ; and it would be impos- 
sible to penetrate far into these distinctively modern provinces 
of aesthetic without throwing off the subjection of art to that 
which pleases in everyday perception. The treatment of 
comedy in the Poetic, of which the details are unhappily lost, 
was therefore in principle a most important extension of Plato's 
reference to the drama. 

TheU j ii. In conformity with the choice of subject mat- 
e g y ' ter is the remark 1 that the laughable is a subdivi- 
sion of the ugly — the laughable being the subject of comedy,, 
and therefore falling within fine art and its essential quality 
the beautiful, though I do not affirm that Aristotle was aware 
of this implied paradox. And more consciously suggestive, in 
the same direction, is the observation, frequently and empha- 
tically repeated, and extended to the whole sphere of " imita- 
tive " art, that an imitation is often agreeable though the 
thing imitated or copied is disagreeable. I quote a charac- 
teristic passage in this sense, with the attempt at explanation 
which the phenomenon elicits. 2 

"It seems that the origin of poetry is entirely due to two 
causes, both of them consisting in natural tendencies. First, 
imitation is innate in human beings, as we see from childhood 
upward, and man differs from other animals in being so given 
to imitation, and his earliest acquisition of knowledge is by 
means of imitation ; and pleasure in imitation too is innate in 
all men. There is evidence of this in the facts ; for we take 
pleasure in looking at the most carefully executed pictures of 
things which in themselves we dislike to look at, such as 



1 Poetic, 5, i. 



2 Poetic, 4. 



53 



HISTORY OF AESTHETIC. 



the forms of the most ignoble animals, or of corpses. And 
secondly, there is this cause, that not only men of science 
enjoy the exercise of apprehension, but the rest of mankind 
enjoy it too ; only their capacity for it is limited. So this is 
why they enjoy seeing the likenesses of things, because it is 
an incident of seeing them that they apprehend and infer what 
each thing: is, as for instance 4 This is he ; ' for if the 
spectator has never seen the thing before it will not be the 
likeness [lit. ' imitation '] which will cause the pleasure, but 
the execution or the colour or some such reason." The second 
" cause " is meant to be an explanation of the first, as the 
following passage shows. 1 " Since the use of the intelligence, 
and the feeling of wonder, are both of them pleasant, it 
necessarily follows that things are pleasant which are of the 
class of mimetic art, such as painting and statuary and poetry- 
fit is most remarkable in connection with what will be said 
below, that music is here omitted] and everything which is 
well imitated, even when the object itself is not pleasant. 
For it is not the object which gives the pleasure, but infer- 
ence takes place that 1 This is that,' so that an exercise of 
the intelligence is brought about." 

The phenomenon thus insisted on opens up vistas that lead 
to romantic art and modern theory. How far did Aristotle 
appreciate its significance ? We are here face to face with 
the recurring problem set by the apparent simplicity of 
Aristotle's thought. We shall see below that a rough and 
ready interpretation of his terms, by merely converting them 
into their current equivalents, will certainly at times lead us 
astray. Yet where the text gives no hint of subtlety, it can 
hardly be right to import it. Literally understood, the above 
passages account for the pleasure which we take in represen- 
tations of the unpleasant, by our enjoyment of the intellectual 
act and achievement involved in simply recognising the object 
portrayed. And of the existence of such a pleasure there is no 
doubt whatever. 2 But it is plain that by merely pressing upon 
the meaning of the term ixavddveiv, " to apprehend," and o-vXkoyl- 
%e<rOai, " to infer," we might introduce such a conception as that 
of entering with full appreciation into the idea, perhaps even into 



1 Rhet., 1371 b, 4. 

2 See Fra Lippo Lippi : " The monks closed in a circle and praised loud," 
etc. 



IDEAL IN ARISTOTLE. 



59 



the mood, embodied in the artistic representation. In this case 
we should have reached an explanation to which modern theory 
has little to add. Aristotle's omission to refer to mood or 
emotion makes in my judgment strongly for the former alter- 
native ; and it is almost impossible, so it seems at least to the 
modern reader, to over-estimate the naivete of Greek criticism. 
But though in the' present case I believe the less pregnant 
interpretation to be nearer the truth, we shall see below that 
we are skating on thin ice when we prefer the more superficial 
explanation of Aristotle. It should be needless to remind the 
reader that no Greek term with all its content and associations 
can by any possibility find a precise equivalent in any English 
term ; and we are not entitled to argue strictly from any 
single rendering, but we must consider how much ground a 
simple term may have covered before the necessity for more 
subtle phrases was perceived. 

However this maybe, it is clear that the fascination of ugli- 
ness in representative art was a newly observed phenomenon 
in contradiction with the simple assumption that the repre- 
sentation affects us as does the corresponding reality. Not 
the content of the likeness, but something, whatever it might 
be, involved in the fact of its being a likeness at all, was thus 
suggested to be the secret of its attraction. 

Poetry ixi- When we read in the Poetics^ that "poetry 
Philosophic. ' ls more philosophical (or scientific) and more 
serious than history " we are apt to imagine ourselves in a 
modern atmosphere ; and certainly the remark shows a recog- 
nition of the ideal in art quite foreign to Plato. Yet when we 
observe that this principle is introduced as an inference from 
the postulate of unity in the plot or action of a drama, that 
this single and self-complete action is more or less contrasted 
with the portrayal of human individuality, and that the 
"scientific" element of poetry lies in its typical generality, 
we are obliged to doubt whether the idealisation thus acknow- 
ledged is more akin to the formal limitations or to the positive 
greatness of Greek drama. If Aristotle, as the sequel of the 
above passage appears to indicate, really preferred on this 
ground the enfeebled later comedy of types and manners 2 to 
the pregnant Aristophanic comedy of humour and portrait- 
satire, his ideas are far less kindred to ours than his, language. 



Poet., 9, 3. 2 See Poet., 5, 3, with reference to Crates. 



6o 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



It will be necessary to recur to this point when we come 
to consider his attitude towards concrete characterisation ; at 
present it is enough to note how clearly he enunciates the 
principle that representation is not to be wholly fettered by 
given reality. 

Musical iv. It will be remembered that the Xenophontic 
symbolism. Socrates discussed the possibility of a presenta- 
tion of the unseen by formative art, and instanced the indica- 
tion of mental moods by look and feature. In Plato all art is 
regarded as capable of being thus significant, but attention is 
drawn more especially to the expressive capacities of music 
and rhythm. 1 In Aristotle we find that: the presentation of 
mental or moral moods is in the strict sense ascribed only to 
music and poetry, to the explicit exclusion of the relation 
between formative art 2 and mental emotions. For these, ac- 
cording to Aristotle, are in pictorial art only indicated through 
external symptoms, such as gesture and complexion, which 
do not constitute in themselves any resemblance to the mental 
feelings. But musical tunes, and words accompanied by music ? 
"contain in themselves likenesses [ lit. 'imitations'] of moral 
moods." Such expressions certainly seem to convey an in- 
tentional exclusion of the view which Socrates suggested, 
and an intentional restriction of that adopted by Plato. " Imi- 
tation " is thus not merely extended over but confined to 
the expressive relation, of whatever kind, by which feeling 
passes directly into rhythm and melody. 

Compare with this the very significant suggestion in his 
jottings of problems for inquiry, " Why does what is heard 
alone of the objects of sense possess emotional import ? 3 for 
even a tune without words has it ; but colour [as such, 4 apart 
from indirect portrayal by its means], and smell and taste 
have none." 

Then is imitation at last freed from "likeness" to a sensuous 
reality, and have we here, in essence, the romantic conception 
of music as a direct embodiment of spiritual emotion ? I 
hardly think so. Aristotle's central proof that music directly 



1 Rep., ii. 400 B. 2 Pol., 1340; cf. Laws, 654-5. 

0 Pi obi., 919 b, 26. Sia rt to o.kov(ttov /xovov e^et rjbos ra)V alaOrjTiov. The 
simple phrase *x et r/dos is a good example of Aristotle's curtness. Our ren- 
dering of this phrase determines our whole ideas of his aesthetic. 

^ The strictness of this reference to colour has an affinity with Kant. The 
truth of the opinion expressed in the text is at least doubtful. 



NATURE AND ART. 



61 



contains the essence of emotion is that in practice it produces 
emotion, particular tunes giving rise, it would seem, to par- 
ticular forms of excitement, 1 just as the music of the dance 
or the march or the hymn reproduces certain elementary 
feelings and active tendencies almost with the certain operation 
of a drug. The movement of the music, I suspect he meant, 
when contrasting it with the indirect expression of painting, is 
the actual movement 2 of the mind or impulses which arises 
when the music is heard. So far then from " imitation" being 
here refined into the aesthetic idea of symbolism, it might even 
be doubted whether what it describes is an aesthetic effect at 
all, if, by an aesthetic effect, we mean not merely response to a 
stimulus but pleasure in an expression. But Aristotle loves 
to work upwards from physical fact to its ideal import ; and 
we shall probably be near the truth if we say that, starting 
from the fact of involuntary response to musical stimulus, he 
accepted an analogical kinship between moral emotion and 
musical expression such as Plato had already insisted on, and 
that therefore he did, as we should certainly judge at first 
sight, admit a symbolic element into his idea of "imitative" 
representation, while excluding from it the simple case of 
copying by formative art. 
Art corrective v. Finally it may be observed that there is at 

of Nature. f[ rst sight a striking resemblance in the analogy 
which Aristotle saw between Art and Nature, 3 to some post- 
Kantian speculations. But for our present purpose it must 
be borne in mind that though Nature is in both schemes 
likened to an inferior art, yet in Aristotle the art which 
makes good the imperfections of Nature is industrial, as 
opposed to the copyist art which reproduces her creations. 
There is here no hint whatever that the art which represents 
is entitled, in modern phrase, "to liberate the real import of 
appearances " 4 from the falsities of commonplace reality. 

Our conclusion then must be that Aristotle was driven to 
stretch the idea of imitation, but that he did not reject it in 
favour of the idea of symbolism. Given reality was still for 
him the standard, but he saw the difference which treatment 
produced in it — he saw that it must be idealised. This is a 
position fairly in accordance with the apparent actual process 



1 Pol., I.e. cont. 2 Probl., I.e. 3 <3?i>o-., 198. 

4 See Introd. to Hegel's ^Esthetic, Eng. Trans., p. 15. 



62 



HISTORY OF AESTHETIC. 



of art, but ultimately inconsistent with itself, and unstable. 
For, if given reality is the standard, what is to indicate the 
direction in which it is to be idealised ? The true answer, "a 
deeper reality," is excluded ex hypothesi so long as given reality 
is the standard. The unaesthetic answer, " morality is the 
guide," is terribly obvious, and I cannot think that Aristotle 
wholly escaped its influence. 1 The answer of abstract aesthetic, 
"Unity and symmetry are the rules," is the confusion of funda- 
mental abstract conditions of art with its concrete content, and 
suggests to us ideal trees that are no trees in particular, and 
ideal dramas whose chief concern is to observe the unities. 
How far in detail Aristotle escaped this confusion, towards 
which the limitations of his aesthetic tended to force him, we 
shall endeavour to determine below. In the meantime it 
seems that his conception of fine art in its relation to nature 
may be fairly summed up as the idealising imitation of 
given reality. 

Aesthetic P> We are now to ask how far Aristotle escapes 
interest. f ro m the moralistic limitation natural to Hel- 
lenic theory, by recognising the demarcation of the peculiar 
pleasure afforded by beauty from all satisfaction attaching to 
practical relations with reality, whether moral, non-moral, or 
immoral. 

Beauty, virtue i- When we turn to his general utterances on 
and Pleasure, su bject of beauty, we find distinctions obviously 
of the nature in question ; but, after Aristotle's manner, each 
element of the distinction is only insisted on for the purpose 
of the moment, so that what is clear in one passage seems 
obscured in another. 

Where it is maintained that mathematics 2 can treat of 
attributes that belong to beauty, the beautiful is distinguished 
from the good ; where the mean life 3 is contrasted with the 
noble life, beauty is distinguished from expediency, but is 
identified with a form of the good ; where sexual preference 4 
is being contrasted with aesthetic selection, real beauty is dis- 
tinguished from beauty which only has reference to desire. 
Thus the boundary between the beautiful and the merely 
pleasant is more firmly maintained than that between the beau- 
tiful and the moral ; and we are disappointed to find in the 
context of the most attractive definition of beauty given by 



1 See ch. iii. above. 2 Metaph., 1078. 3 Rhet., 1390. 4 Prod/., 896 b. 



BEAUTY AND EDUCATION. 



63 



Aristotle — " the beautiful 1 is that good which is pleasant be- 
cause it is good " — that virtue is explicitly included under the 
head of the beautiful. Nevertheless it is probably thus classi- 
fied not on moralizing grounds, but as possessing a certain 
immediate splendour analogous to the beauty of sense. 2 We 
see, however, that the differentia which should confine the 
beautiful to the province of sense and imagination is conspicu- 
ous by its absence, except in as far as it is implied in the 
amount of attention devoted to " imitative " art. 

There can be little doubt that Aristotle, if led to define 
beauty in all its relations at once, would have traced its fron- 
tier satisfactorily. But he has not, in fact, left us a systematic 
treatment of the general subject, and does not seem to have 
conceived such a treatment in his own mind. 

Educational n - ^ nas Deen suggested 3 that Aristotle's inter- 

interest. es t [ n beauty was mainly educational. It is true 
that the chief account which he gives of music and drawing 
occurs in the educational sections of the Politics. But we 
must remember that to introduce aesthetic interest into educa- 
tion is not the same as to introduce educational interest into 
aesthetic. The former Aristotle certainly did at least in one 
instance ; how far he did the latter may be best discussed in 
connection with his celebrated definition of tragedy. 

The noble saying which is Aristotle's criticism upon the 
received estimate of drawing as an element in education, is a 
proof that he regarded education as incomplete without an 
attempt to develop true aesthetic perception. Drawing is to 
be taught, he suggests, 4 not merely to impart skill in estima- 
ting the commercial value of articles, but because it makes the 
pupils good observers of the beauty of objects. How far a 
similar aesthetic interest is indicated in the discussion of the 
aims with which music is to be taught depends largely on our 
interpretation of the definition of tragedy, which is echoed in 
part of the educational inquiry. It is plain, indeed, that Aris- 
totle values both music and drama, not only as an educationist 
for their effect on character, but as a man of the world for 
their recreative and social function. The question is as to 
the precise nature of the higher recreation as understood by 
him. 



1 Rhet., 1366. 3 See above on Beautiful Soul, p. 37. 

3 Ulrici, in Miiller, 2, 181. 4 Pol., 1338. 



6 4 



HISTORY OF /ESTHETIC. 



_ _ iii. It will be well now to consider the question 

The Function . r . ..... ^ r 

of before us in connection with the only account 01 a 
Tragedy. f orm 0 f this higher recreation which 'has been pre- 
served to us at all completely as it came from Aristotle's hand. 
Materials from a - The celebrated definition of Tragedy in the 
Aristotle. Poetics may, I believe, be fairly paraphrased as 
follows. " Tragedy is a representation [lit. imitation] of 
an action noble and complete in itself, and of appreciable 
magnitude, in language of special fascination, using different 
kinds of utterance in the different parts, given through per- 
formers and not by means of narration, and producing, by 
(the stimulation of) pity and fear, the alleviating discharge of 
emotions of that nature." Of these defining terms, "noble" 
distinguishes the subject-matter which tragedy shares with 
epic from that, viz. forms of the inferior or ugly, which comedy 
shares with satire. " Complete in itself" refers to the demand 
for organic unity of structure, having beginning, middle and 
end, which is the only form of unity strictly demanded by 
Aristotle. Unity of time is alluded to only in the remark that 
the action of tragedy is confined as a rule to one day or little 
more; unity of place is not mentioned. "Of appreciable 
magnitude " refers to the necessity that a beautiful thing should 
be readily apprehended in its parts and also as a whole. 
" Language of special fascination " refers to the employment 
of rhythm and melody ; "with different kinds of utterance " to 
the difference between iambic declamation and choric song ; 
" given through performers " distinguishes drama from epic ; 
it is noticeable, however, that Aristotle admits that a drama 
can be judged of by reading. The remaining portion of the 
definition has been the subject of much controversy, which 
will never perhaps be finally laid to rest. Space forbids me 
to defend at length the rendering which I have adopted with 
full conviction. 1 I merely mention, on account of its surpas- 
sing historical interest, the fact that Lessing, in harmony with 
the spirit " of his century, not yet set free by Goethe," 2 ren- 
dered the term KaOapo-i?, which I have paraphrased as " allevia- 
ting discharge," by the equivalent "purification," and held it 
to indicate a conversion of passion or emotion in general into 

1 Resting on Bernays' Zwei Abhandlungen iiber d. Aristotelische Theorie d. 
Drama, Berlin, 1880 (first published 1857), which cannot be too strongly 
recommended for its suggestiveness and lucidity. 

~ Bernays, I.e. 



ARISTOTLE ON TRAGEDY. 



65 



virtuous dispositions ; that Goethe rightly protested on general 
grounds against such an interpretation, but proposed in its 
place one quite incompatible with Aristotle's Greek ; and that 
Hegel, 1 while not directly challenging the authenticity of 
the current expression, " purification of the passions," interprets 
it and restricts it in a way that makes it a vehicle for the most 
pregnant meaning that could possibly be ascribed to Aristotle. 

The definite explanation of the term icdOapo-is, which Aris- 
totle had given in the Poetics, has not been preserved. The 
rendering here adopted is chiefly though not solely founded on 
a passage in the Politics? treating of certain effects of music, 
from which it appears that "purification" (or rather " purga- 
tion ") does not fall w T ithin the educational province, and that it 
is a special term indicating an action upon persons predisposed 
to pity and terror (which all are in some degree) analogous to 
that by which orgiastic strains produce first excitement and then 
restoration to tranquillity in persons of ecstatic temperament. It 
is by a similar operation of music (theatrical music is explicitly 
mentioned) that all persons, in so far as they are predisposed to 
pity and fear, may be brought to undergo " a kind of purga- 
tion and relief accompanied by pleasure." The analogy is 
medical, and indicates a relief from the passions rather than a 
purification of them. 

It may be added to this necessarily slight account of our 
materials for estimating the aim of tragedy as conceived by 
Aristotle, that he regarded the laws of the beautiful as neces- 
sarily applicable to the tragic treatment of action ; 3 that the 
psychological connection of pity and fear as laid down in 
the Rhetoric suggests to us the conception of an idealised 
terror, acting through human sympathy, as the essence of 
the tragic emotion referred to ; that its aim, or at least an 
element in its aim, was pleasure, not however all pleasure, 
but the pleasure 4 arising from pity and fear by means of 
artistic presentation (lit. by means of imitation), but that 
the "purgative" function of good music — and, we may 
presume, of good poetry — though plainly separate from educa- 
tion or edification on the one hand, does also appear to be 
distinguished on the other hand from the sheer entertainment 
or recreation (avdiravo-i?) to be provided by inferior music for 
the more vulgar kind of audience. 5 

1 sEsth.-, 3, 531. 2 Pol., 1340 a, 1342 a. 3 Poetic, 7, 4. 
4 Poetic, 14, 3. 5 Politics, 1341. 

F 



HISTORY OF /ESTHETIC. 



Estimate of Ms A In contrasting Plato and Aristotle with refer- 
Meaning. ence to their estimates of the secondary effects of 
tragedy, we are apt to forget how closely they agree with 
regard to its primary psychical operation. The spectator 
at a play 1 indulges his emotions, chiefly those of pity, or 
fear, without the restraints of practical life, and finds a plea- 
sure in such indulgence, and this pleasure, Plato at least 
maintains, the tragedian is ready to purchase at any price, 
shrinking from no source of emotional excitement. The 
difference begins after this point. Plato thinks only how 
emotion is intensified by habit and contagion ; Aristotle 
applies another principle, not wholly alien to Plato, but in this 
context a practically new departure. 

The principle is in general, that emotion may be relieved, 
discharged or mitigated by mere indulgence. This is not 
the same as to say with both Plato and Aristotle in their 
educational theory that emotion may be disciplined by being 
excited under moralising influences. But whether Aristotle 
meant the full opposite of this conception, that is, to accept 
as the basis of art the fact of psychical excitement pure and 
simple, without considering the relation to life of the content 
active in the excitement, is the question which we now have 
to approach. 

The problem is complementary to that of Aristotle's 
psychological explanation of enjoyment in the portrayal of 
the unpleasant. There the question was, " Does he refer 
to the pleasure of bare recognition, or to the satisfaction of 
profound appreciation?" Here the question is, "Does he 
refer to the pleasure of any thrilling emotion ending in an 
agreeable languor, or to the delight of pregnant conflicts of 
feeling issuing in a calm which is reasonable as well as patho- 
logical ? Does he, in short, take account of ideal content as 
well as of psychical sensibility ?" It is the same question in 
another form when we ask whether for him as for Plato the 
pleasure which is the aim of tragedy is pleasure at any price. 

It appears to me that we have here a case of the hetero- 
geneous definition which we saw 2 to be so tempting and so 
fallacious. It is clear that the pleasurable thrill of the com- 
monest passion — anger, 3 for example — was a fact observed 



1 Rep., x. 606. cf. Phcedrus, 268. 

2 Chap. i. 3 Rhetoric, 1370 b, 10. 



ARISTOTLE ON TRAGEDY. 



6 7 



by Aristotle, and influencing him in his aesthetic theory. It 
is clear that the pathological phenomena which furnished the 
analogy for his conception of alleviating discharge are akin as 
well to the narcotic languor which succeeds the morbid excite- 
ment aroused by a thoroughly vicious play or novel, as to the 
tranquillity of assuaged emotion which is brought about by 
reading the Antigone or the CEdipus at Colonics. 

But it is no less clear that he did not mean to identify the 
vulgar or morbid affections with the operation of tragic art. 
The object of tragedy is pleasure, but only the pleasure of 
tragedy, and the pleasure of tragedy is a form of enjoyment 
strictly limited by the conditions which were explained in its 
definition. Now if we ask, how this limitation, this picking 
and choosing within given reality, can be justified, we shall 
find no real answer short of the complete liberation of art, not 
only from the standard of common reality, but from the 
kindred aim of thrilling the common sensibility. " Idealisation" 
would be then a simple consequence of the demand for the 
most pregnant expression, and the mere discharge of feeling 
would be recognised as an extreme no more proper to art 
than the opposite extreme of moral purification. Aristotle, 
not being prepared to break away in principle from the pre- 
sentation of common reality, could not reconcile these aims, all 
of which he saw to be essential. They are therefore simply 
thrown together to limit each other as best they may. Plea- 
sure and emotion are necessary, but not at the expense of 
nobleness ; nobleness is necessary, but not at the expense 
of the power to stimulate emotion. 

The emphasis which he rightly laid on utterance and in- 
telligence did not lead him to the idea that the delight of 
these factors of art was no mere psychical Occident, but was 
the manifestation of joy in self-expression, the ultimate root 
and ground of aesthetic pleasure ; and therefore when we are 
asked whether Aristotle reco'gnised aesthetic as apart from real 
interest (either moral or hedonistic) we' are thrown into per- 
plexity. Emotional utterance, rational content, a free deal- 
ing with reality, all these he recognises as elements of art. 
But instead of combining them as ' l the emotional utterance of 
rational content in forms freely drawn from reality," he in- 
clines to separate them as "the pleasure of utterance," " the 
formal beauty of ideal content," " the moral emendation of 
reality," so that perhaps we ought to reply that he recognises 



63 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



all the elements of aesthetic interest, but that he tends to 
speak of them in terms that indicate their origin in common 
reality rather than their transfiguration in artistic enjoyment. 
But at any rate the stress laid on the enjoyment of expression 
and self-utterance, although in contents and emotions which 
as such are painful, is a step substantially incompatible with 
f he relation of allegiance to given reality, and has kinship 
with the modern idea of sport or simulated action as the dis- 
charge of superfluous vitality, as well as with the conception 

of expression for expression's sake. 

concrete 7 We have seen that with Aristotle the stan- 

criticism. c | arc j Q f commonplace reality began to yield before 
the observed necessities of idealisation, and that fine art in 
its highest form was pronounced by him to centre in emotional 
self-utterance. We are now to ask, in terms of our third 
antithesis, how far in detail his critical insight broke down 
the formal abstractness of Greek aesthetic, and took the 
shape of analytic inquiry into concrete expressiveness and 
characterisation. 
History and *• Aristotle even loses, as compared with Plato, 

o? Drama sometmn g of that kind of concreteness which arises 
from a various object matter. He left, it would 
appear, no aesthetic recognition of architecture and the minor 
crafts, while even sculpture and painting, though referred to in 
the discussion of particular problems, are held to be on a lower 
level of expressive capacity than music and poetry. It is only 
in virtue of such references, and of his retention of the com- 
mon name " mimetic " for fine art in general, that we are 
entitled to draw conclusions from his treatment of music and 
poetry to anything like a general aesthetic theory. 

But yet the first attempt to analyse the structure and evolu- 
tion of a form of art, and to deduce its origin from fundamen- 
tal tendencies in human nature, marks an epoch in aesthetic 
reflection, which has always been most vital when most histori- 
cal. For history cannot but involve some recognition that what 
men do expresses what they are, and the most elementary 
analysis of structure pioneers a way by which reflection can 
gain access to its object. 

That ''imitation" 1 or representation is an innate tendency 
in man ; that from the first it has taken in poetry two co- 



1 Poetic, 4. 



PARTS OF A TRAGEDY. 



6 9 



ordinate forms, so that the Iliad or Odyssey is a forerunner 
of tragedy just as the Margites of comedy ; that both species 
of drama developed through many changes out of perfor- 
mances in which poet and actor were one, but that comedy 
was later than tragedy in arriving at completion, and that the 
iambic metre was adopted in the course of this development 
from the very nature of the case, being nearest of all metres 
to common speech ; this, with the well-known details as to 
the number of the actors, and with the opinion that tragedy 
had at length reached a final because adequate form, is the 
substance of Aristotle's brief history of the drama. 

Nature, he says, was its cause, through the mimetic impulse ; 
and the diverging tendencies of man's disposition, towards 
the noble and the ignoble respectively, have been its guides. 

Even from this imperfect summary the reader will feel that 
the great naturalist breathes vitality into his subject, and has 
grasped the unity of human nature in its most splendid self- 
manifestations. 

The importance of the function which he assigned to artistic 
imagination, though he acknowledged no such faculty by name, 
may be illustrated by the technical terms employed by him in 
the analysis of tragedy. It is not necessary to suppose that 
they were all originated by himself. 

Omitting the quantitative division of tragedy into Pro- 
logue, Parodos, etc., although even these show the sense of 
a necessary order in the work of art, we should notice the sixi 
qualitative elements, three forming the object represented, 
viz. fable or plot, character or moral temperament, intel- 
lectual reflection ; two constituting the means of representation, 
viz. linguistic expression and music ; and one being the 
mode of representation, viz. the mise-en- scene, including ta 
a Greek the masks of the performers. 

Not all of these elements need special remark. The 
*lFable," or " Composition of the incidents," is the life of the 
play, and the great test of the poet. 2 All the above-mentioned 
postulates of unity refer to it. It may be "simple" or 
" complex," and in every case contains a transition from 
happiness to misfortune, or the reverse, and, if "complex," 
will contain, as the instruments of this transition, " surprising 
reversals" or "recognitions." The fable will also contain 



1 Poet, 6, 7. 



2 Cf. Phcedo, 61 B ; afi. Bernays, p. 186. 



7o 



HISTORY OF ^ESTHETIC. 



the "Pathos," which is "a disastrous or painful incident." 
The external reference of " pathos " as here first mentioned 
is worth noticing. 

The construction of the fable and its parts is further 
analysed with a view to securing its conformity to the con- 
ditions of tragic emotion. The nature and content assigned 
to such emotion in Aristotle's theory has already been dis- 
cussed. Human life was to be the interest ; but what human 
life we find a more difficult question. 

Every tragedy, finally, may be divided into a " knot " or 
entanglement (which might also be called the plot, if that 
term is not appropriated to the " fable " or argument), and 
a ddnot'tment or solution. 

It will at once be seen how many ideal requirements are 
imposed by this analysis on the art which " imitates " reality 
— how it is directed to the task of concentrating the confused 
panorama of life into a single, coherent, striking, and natural 
picture. It is worth observing, as a touch of distinctness in 
advance of Plato, that the mise-en-scene is dismissed as not 
belonging to the poet's art, though fascinating in itself. 

It is further worth pointing out that Aristotle is disposed 
in several ways to defend poetic licence against a too literal 
criticism, observing that interpretation must recognise a certain 
play of language, 1 that what is an error judged by a special 
science is not, unless wanton, necessarily an error judged by 
yfjoetic purpose, and t hat an a c tion in a play_Jllust be^mi^jsed 
\s according tojitne^S-as weJ Las according to mer it. 

Plot and char- ii. I have reserved for discussion by itself a 
acter-drawmg. vei y important relation between two of the six 
" elements " of tragedy. What place does character-drawing, 
or characterisation, hold with reference to plot ? 

I start, as in other cases, w r ith the rough and ready notion 
of Aristotle's meaning, which we obtain by simply accepting 
current renderings as literal, In the present case I may state 
it by a quotation from Mr. Mahaffy : * 

" Of these various elements [the six above-mentioned], 
Aristotle justly considers the plot as by far the most impor- 
tant, observing that recent tragedians had succeeded, by 
paying attention to this point, without any character-drawing " 
[ethos]. The term " ethos," which I have rendered above 



1 Poet., 25. 2 History of Greek Literature, vol. ii. p. 409. 



PLOT AND CHARACTER. 



71 



by "moral temperament," is here translated "character" in 
the sense apparently in which character is understood to-day 
to be the object of artistic portraiture in Shakespeare or 
Thackeray. 

The view thus ascribed to Aristotle is in startling an- 
tagonism with our ideas. Pure plot-interest without character 
is for us on a level with the interest of a puzzle and its answer, 
and therefore in art, with the interest of a story whose char- 
acters are mere ciphers manoeuvred through strange and 
intricate combinations. True, we demand a well-constructed 
plot ; but we think no art worthy of the name in which the 
action fails to issue necessarily from human character. Yet 
Aristotle's language sounds strong in the opposite sense. I 
reproduce the whole passage on which our judgment must 
mainly depend, retaining the actual word "ethos" in place 
of any rendering. I believe that I am right in saying that 
the normal application of ethos in Plato and Aristotle is to 
types of character as described by a single term with a moral 
connotation, such as "courage," "temperance," "gentleness," 
and their opposites. 

After enumerating the six qualitative elements of tragedy, 
Aristotle continues : 1 

" The most important of these elements is the composition 
of the incidents [the plot or fable]. For tragedy is a repre- 
sentation [imitation] not of men and women, but of action and 
life. Now good and ill fortune attend upon action, and man's 
purpose is always some kind of activity, not a quality ; but 
what ethos determines are the qualities of persons, while action 
makes them happy or unfortunate. And so poets do not 
represent persons acting in order to display their ethos, but 
they take it in as an accessory to action. Thus the incidents 
and the fable are the purpose of tragedy ; and in everything 
the purpose is the most important. Moreover there cannot 
be a tragedy without action, but there can be without ethos ; 
most of the later tragedies are without it, and among poets 
in general it is rare. For they are like Zeuxis compared with 
Polygnotus among painters : Polygnotus is a good painter of 
ethos, while the art of Zeuxis indicates nothing of the kind. 
[Could Aristotle mean that Zeuxis was unable to paint char- 
acteristic likenesses ?] Again, if you string together speeches 



1 Foe/., 6. 



72 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



that have ethos, 1 and are excellent in expression and reflec- 
tions, yet you will not attain the aim of tragedy nearly so well 
as with a play inferior in these respects, but having a fable (or 
plot) and composition of incidents. It is just as in painting ; 
to put on the most beautiful colours at random would not pro- 
duce as much pleasure as to draw a portrait in chalk. Nay, 
more ; the most fascinating elements of tragedy, the surprises 
and recognitions, belong to the fable. And it is a further proof 
of our view, that beginners in poetry attain completeness in 
expression and ethe [plural of ethos], before they are capable 
of composing the march of incidents ; almost all the earliest 
poets are instances of this. So the fable is the mainspring 
and, so to say, the life of the tragedy, and the ethe are 
secondary; for the tragedy is a representation of an action and 
of agents only for the sake of the action." With this should 
be compared the passage translated in chapter hi. 2 

It will be observed that if the term ethos here corresponds 
to character or character-drawing in the modern sense, it re- 
sults that in the comparison with painting characterisation is 
contrasted with portraiture and assimilated to non-pictorial 
colour effect; which latter, however, must rather be an extreme 
simile to show how far removed this ethos is from what we 
call character. For according to the Problemata mere colour as 
such has no expressive capacity, not even for mood or temper 
(ethos), much less, therefore, I presume for individual 
character. 

Further, " ethos" determines "of what sort" 3 a person is ; 
and this " sort " means primarily whether he is good or bad. 4 
Speeches which have no ethos are such as display no relation 
positive or negative to a purpose ; 5 it is the kind of purpose, 
i.e. primarily, whether it is good or bad, that marks the ethos 
of the speaker. Again, the idea of stringing together " ethical " 
speeches is clearly I think a reminiscence of Plato's distinction 
between emotional harangues, which are beginners' work, 0 
and composition, which is the test of the master. The fact 
that ''intellectual reflections" are an element distinct from 
ethos testifies to the same thing, for in every true character- 
portrait the vein of intellect is included. 

Therefore it appears to me that ethos in Aristotle's aesthetic 



1 Cf. Phcedrus, 268. 3 p. 20, sup. 3 Poet., ib. 

4 Quot. above, chap. iii. p. 20. 5 Poet., ib. 6 Phcedrus, 268. 



aristotle's real view. 



73 



meant not individual character, the concrete living creation at 
once mysterious and intelligible, that we look for in modern 
art, but something more typical and generic, not without a 
moral reference, as we say "good" or "bad" character. And 
so if we look at what is demanded of ethos in tragedy, 1 we 
find four requirements : first, it must be good ; then appro- 
priate to the person ; then natural ; then even or consistent ; 
and if the person is to be of inconsistent temper, then consis- 
tently inconsistent. No doubt these latter requirements show 
some awakening to the importance of characterisation ; but it 
is to be noted that they are all secondary to goodness. The 
possibility that this demand for goodness may be a confused 
attempt to require that tolerableness or beauty which splendid 
characterisation can bestow on the worst character, does not 
entitle us to interpret Aristotle's postulate in a way which he 
nowhere suggests. 

Thus it occurs to us that the antithesis which seems indi- 
cated by a literal rendering of Aristotle, may not be that which 
he had in mind. He may not have been contrasting the plot, 
as a mere puzzle and solution, with the portrayal of individual 
human character, but he may rather have intended to oppose 
the man as revealed in action, or in speech which contributes 
to advance the march of incident, with monologue or conver- 
sation simply intended to emphasize this or that type of dis- 
position in the interlocutors. The illustration from painting 
confirms this suggestion. The plot seems to be compared to 
a portrait, not indeed of persons as such, but, we must 
suppose, of action and life ; that is, we may venture to suggest, 
of persons in action according to the necessities of their cha- 
racter. A mere plot-puzzle is not a portrait of life. And yet 
the stress laid by Aristotle upon the incidents of good and ill 
fortune ought perhaps to make us feel that the child-like inte- 
rest in the mere event, the triumph or failure of a human 
being, not because he has great character, but because our 
attention is drawn to him, may have been more natural to the 
Greek than to us. 

If, however, we were to press home the suggestion which 
has forced itself upon us, we should find that instead of the 
most infantile of all views of the drama we were attributing to 
Aristotle the most profound. We should no longer imagine 



1 Poetic, 15. 



74 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



that Aristotle rated ingenious plot-construction first (for apart 
from character it could not be more than ingenious), and held 
the revelation of the mind and heart to be secondary and 
superfluous ; we should understand him to be contrasting the 
revelation of human lives in their necessary movement and 
collision, produced by character in action, with moralising 
argument or with the mere display of sentiment. 

The tragedians after Euripides are to us mere names ; and 
whether Euripides himself, who died before Sophocles, was to 
Aristotle an instance of ancient or modern style, is hard to 
conjecture. I do not think it possible to elucidate the problem 
before us by reference to literary history. It could hardly be 
suggested that the tendency to characterisation diminished 
in the later tragedians, although some among the creations 
of y^Eschylus have in this respect never been surpassed. 
But it may well have been the case that such a play as the 
Prometheus Bound, depending for its attraction wholly on a 
picture of superhuman courage and endurance, and hardly 
possessing any element of a plot, did not seem to the aesthetic 
philosopher to be in the strictest sense a drama. I suggest 
this as an example of a play that has ethos, and has not dra- 
matic composition. It has been doubted whether our great 
modern dramatic analyst has displayed- genuine capacity to 
construct a play that will march. If this doubt is justified, 
Browning may be cited as an illustration of the antithesis 
between stringing together monologues that display the good 
and bad in character, and composing a dramatic action. 

I believe, however, that neither of the conceptions which I 
have thus contrasted would express Aristotle's exact position, 
which lies somewhere between them. He must, we are driven 
to conclude, have accepted that element of character which is 
the moving spring of plot as a part of the human situation and 
conditions to be portrayed. But his failing to insist upon this 
element in its subjective aspect shows that his point of view 
was still on the whole Hellenic, and was more simple and more 
external than that which takes the human mind to be the essence 
in all drama. And we still are at one with him in holding the 
mere exhibition of temperament in its moral aspects, when not 
genuinely elicited by the necessities of the story, to be drama- 
tically superfluous. 

Thus we cannot allege that Aristotle explicitly breaks the 
fetters of Greek aesthetic, by throwing his interest into the free 



/ 



ARISTOTLE S ADVANCE. 



75 



representation of spiritual powers as embodied in great cha- 
racters and their collision. His chief care is for organic unity 
and dramatic composition. Only as he presses this unity into 
detail after detail, it becomes more and more concrete and 
pregnant ; and we almost incline to believe that in substance, 
though certainly not in form, he identifies the object of artistic 
representation not with the common shows of life, but with 
spiritual forces in their deepest reality. 

It has been maintained that throughout his aesthetic 
discussion Aristotle is covertly criticising Plato. 1 This 
is a needlessly disagreeable way of observing that the 
later writer's mind is wholly permeated with ideas drawn 
from the earlier. It is bv no single origination that the 
advance was made which I have endeavoured to depict. 
It consisted, first, in Aristotle's unhesitating recognition of a 
supreme value in the whole sphere of beauty — an attitude 
natural to the successor who inherits at one blow the concep- 
tions which their author elaborated gradually and without 

<_> j 

realising their entire significance — and secondly, in the definite 
ascription of important functions and properties to representa- 
tive art all along the boundary-line where it faces common- 
place reality. Thus throughout the three antitheses by which 
I have attempted to gauge the flowing tide of Greek aesthetic 
speculation, the reality of common experience shows in Aris- 
totle a tendency to lose its controlling position ; for, metaphy- 
sically, art, and we must suppose all formal beauty in its 
degree, is credited with the power to represent what is unseen, 
and the deeper truth ; ethically, the interest of beauty is at 
least not wholly identified either with _ moral or again wit h 
sensuuus_ajmsj and aesthetically there is revealed in the beau- 
tiful, under pressure of an appreciative analysis, an ideal unity 
of structure such as to display the events of life in their essen- 
tial connection, which is in some degree acknowledged to 
nave its roots in human character. 

But, on the other hand, not only does Aristotle retain the 
technical term " imitative," as the differentia of the art that 
realises beauty, qualifying it by no scientific expression that 
recognises the idealisation which in practice he admits, but, 
what is more important, he has no distinct answer to the ques- 
tion what principle prescribes the direction which this idealisa- 



1 Schasler, i. 149-155. 



76 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



tion is to take. To say "the direction of beauty" is tau- 
tology; to say "the direction of symmetry and unity" is 
dangerously formal and empty ; to say " the direction of 
morality " is simply false. All these directions are hinted at 
by him, and no deeper theory is suggested. Therefore we 
cannot pronounce that he abandoned the essential limitations 
of Hellenic theory concerning the beautiful. 



CHAPTER V 



ALEXANDRIAN AND GRECO-ROMAN CULTURE TO THE REIGN 
OF CONSTANTINE THE GREAT. 

character of In the hundred and fifty years that ended with 
the Period. t | le d ea th of Aristotle there had lived and worked 
in the city of Athens, containing a population about equal 
to that of Glasgow, three of the greatest philosophers, 
four of the greatest poets, and more than one of the greatest 
formative artists, that the world has ever seen. If we further 
represent to ourselves the speculative, poetic, and plastic 
activity of Hellas in general throughout or before the same 
period, taking as a background to the whole picture the 
Iliad and Odyssey, which imply at least two poets of the 
very highest rank, we shall be in some degree prepared to 
estimate the change that came over the civilized world during 
the fourth century before Christ. It is only the simple truth 
if we say that no speculative thinker of at all the same calibre 
as Aristotle existed again before the time of Descartes, no 
formative artist singly 1 on a level with Praxiteles before the 
time of Giotto, no poet having the strictly poetic greatness of 
the Athenian dramatists before the time of Dante. And if 
we were resolved to take account of nothing but the supreme 
moments of the aesthetic consciousness, and the clearest 
crystallizations of the thought that reflects upon it, we should 
at this point be forced to the salto mortale of 1,600 years to 
Dante, or 2,000 to Burke or Lessing. But such a procedure 
could only be justified if it were the fact, or if it were con- 
ceivable that after this immense interval, which would then be 
inexplicable, the thread of reflection and production had been 
taken up again from the point at which it was dropped. 

Now the fact is, on the contrary, that in this interval the 
aesthetic consciousness had traversed an enormous distance 



1 The emphasis to be laid below on mediaeval architecture will explain this 
reservation. 

77 



73 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



from its Hellenic origin, partly as latent in the general move- 
ment of mind and history, but partly also in its own shape as 
art and literature and critical or speculative reflection upon 
beauty. 

We must therefore attempt in this and the following chapter 
to set up landmarks, however few and distant from each other, 
by which the appreciation of the beautiful may be followed 
through the complex movement which carried the old world 
forward into the new. 

For six centuries at least after the death of Alexander the 
civilization which had its roots in Hellas was the civilization of 
the world. If we ask at what date it ceased to be so, a 
definite reply cannot be given. New principles emerge in 
history and obtain supremacy, gradually, and not at one blow. 
Before Justinian closed the schools of Athens in 529 a.d., the 
art of the new world had been growing for at least two hun- 
dred years, and had already attained its first climax in the 
Church of the Heavenly Wisdom at Constantinople. Nor did 
Proclus in the fifth century carry the philosophic tradition of 
a thousand years far beyond the point to which Plotinus had 
brought it in the third. 

I shall therefore limit myself in the present chapter to the 
period between the death of Alexander in 323 B.C. and the 
inauguration of Constantinople as the seat of government for 
the Roman empire in 330 a.d. It has been well observed 
that the earliest known building which displays the principle 
of modern architecture undisguised by traditional Hellenic 
forms — the palace of Diocletian at Spalato — was erected 1 
within a few years of the latter all-important change. And 
the historian of philosophy may add, that Plotinus, who died 
in the latter half of the third century a.d., had, as the last great 
Hellenic thinker, broken the bonds of ancient theory concern- 
ing the beautiful, while the later writer Augustine, at the 
close of the fourth, was to announce the distinctively modern 
principle of a certainty implied in intellectual doubt. 2 And 
although the Greek poetry of the Anthology revealed a last 
after-prime of classical genius in the reign of Justinian, and 



1 In 313 a.d. See William Morris, Lecture on the History of Pattern- 
Designing, in a volume of lectures by himself, Mr. Poynter and others. 
Published by Macmillan, 1882. 

2 Augustine, de Trinitate, x. 14. See Rigg, Pico d. Mirandola, Introd. 



THE " DECADENCE." 



79 



lived, or at least existed until the dawn of the Renaissance, 
yet the true prime of this minor poetic art had passed away 
with Meleager before the Christian era. 

We are accustomed to regard the Alexandrian and Greco- 
Roman ages as a time of decadence in culture. They form 
about one-half of that mysterious transition during which the 
whole of Europe produced no work of individual genius that 
could compare with those which had been common things 
throughout the creative period in Athens and in Ionia. Our 
judgment to this effect has acquired peculiar associations from 
the portrayal of a world lying in wickedness and impotent for 
intellectual or moral good, which Christian advocates have 
impressed upon the popular mind. But in the first place, 
those who take a natural view of history must assume that 
every apparent decadence has operative within it the causes 
which lead to the subsequent advance — in so far as that 
advance is not due to nations outside the range of the de- 
cadence. And in the second place, as soon as we consider 
with impartial attention the phenomena of Alexandrian and 
Greco-Roman art and letters, we see that we have before us 
a movement of extraordinary width and variety, which at 
every turn reveals new elements of feeling and a new spirit 
akin to modern humanism. 

To define the tendencies of this period, in contrast, for 
instance, with those of the Periclean age of Athens, is a task 
which strongly impresses us with the defects of abstract 
language. We had a foretaste of the same difficulty in 
attempting to explain what Aristotle meant by ethos in 
poetic art as indicating a quality in which the more recent 
writers were deficient. The antithesis between Ethos and 
Pathos, which is currently read into these observations of 
Aristotle, is hardly justified by his language. But assuming 
that it fairly represents what is implied in his expressions, it 
still remains very hard to interpret. The portrayal of " char- 
acter" belongs in one sense more to yEschylus than to 
Menander, in another sense to Menander more than to 
yEschylus ; and if "Pathos" is equivalent to 4i a sensation " 
in the modern literary meaning of the term, and it is much 
nearer to this than to what we call pathos — it is hard to 
imagine that the later drama had more of it than the Aga- 
memnon or the CEdipus King. 

And thus again if we try to lay down that culture in the 



8o 



HISTORY OF AESTHETIC. 



period now before us is rather ' ' subjective," and in the earlier 
time of a more " objective " cast, we are met by the apparent 
contradiction that in the later time philosophy becomes in 
great part less speculative and more inclined to physical con- 
ceptions, poetry is more devoted to natural beauty and to the 
presentation of daily life, formative art takes among other 
directions that of landscape, of portraiture, of anatomical 
study, while literary criticism develops a sense of history and 
an elaborate discrimination of individual styles. 

Or if we attempt to apply the antithesis of social and in- 
dividual interest, and to treat the peculiarities of the later 
period as depending upon the self-concentration of the indi- 
vidual's powers in his own life instead of their devotion to a 
community, we are again face to face with the paradox that 
in the world of art and letters we meet with no such com- 
manding individualities in the later age as in the earlier, 
while we everywhere find evidences in it of a growing sensitive- 
ness, unknown before, to the idea of humanity as a whole. 

Thus it might seem that the application of the above 
antitheses might just as well be reversed. Is it possible, 
then, at all to describe in general language that distinction 
between the two periods which we can very readily feel ? 

The fact is that we are here dealing on a small scale with 
the contrast between the antique and the modern spirit. And 
the reason why no simple antithesis appears to meet the case 
is that whereas the antique spirit is single, the modern is 
divided. Tested, therefore, by the extreme of any abstract 
tendency, the modern spirit overpasses the antique ; only the 
completeness and thoroughness, whether intellectual and 
imaginative or political and social, that marks the highest 
perfection of genius as of life, is for this very reason difficult 
of attainment in a "modern" period, and was not in fact 
attained during the six centuries of transition which we are 
now preparing to consider. Thus we can understand how 
the culture of the " decadence " was at once more " objective" 
and more "subjective," more individualistic yet more alive to 
humanity as a whole, more ascetic and yet more romantic, 
than that of the preceding age. 

It will be worth while to adduce in a brief summary the 
principal aspects of this many-sided movement, rather in 
order to recall to the reader what he already knows, with a 
view to a certain interpretation, than with the idea of ade- 



NEW TENDENCIES. 



8.1 



quately describing a huge complex of phenomena which the 
meanest of text-books would not attempt to deal with in the 
space at my command. 

We will speak first of the tone and temper of life evinced 
by the philosophies of the time, which must be treated for this 
purpose as mere data in moral and intellectual history, and of 
the actual sense of beauty revealed in the art and letters of 
the so-called decadence. And, secondly, we will bring down 
the history of aesthetic criticism and speculation, if our frag- 
mentary treatment of this period deserves the name of history, 
to the close of original Greek speculation in Plotinus. 
General PMio- 1 - The extreme tendencies which have been 
sopny and Art. alluded to sometimes displayed themselves — as 
extremes will meet — within a single group of productions or 
of opinions ; but as a rule were dispersed among different 
schools of thought or different modes of art. 

a. It would be unfair to say of Plato and Aris- 

Pnilosophy. . - ., J r 0 

totle, and notoriously untrue to say 01 bocrates, 
that their philosophy was not essentially concerned with 
practice. Yet even for Socrates, and still more for his great 
successors, practice was bound up with social devotion, with 
civic solidarity, and with a positive faith in reason. But when 
Hellenic city-politics had lost their importance, and the organic 
philosophy of Hellas had broken up like the empire of Alex- 
ander, a temper supervened in which, it may be observed 
in pctssmg, some clues of thought were picked up again which 
had been thrust aside for the moment by the centralized 1 
speculation of Imperial Athens. The Heraclitean and the 
Cynic found a new development in the Stoic, the Atomist 
and the Cyrenaic in the follower of Epicurus, the Eleatic, and 
the Megarian, and in some degree Socrates himself, in the 
negative speculation and practical interest of the earlier 
Scepticism. 

In the new political conditions all correspondence between 
the outer and the inner reason, between social organization 
and the social will, was for the time destroyed. And thus 
the individual man was thrown back upon himself ; upon his 
private needs and interests on the one hand, and, on the 



1 Cf. Mr. Mackail's remarks, Greek Anthology, p. 289, on the interruption 
of epigrammatic production during the bloom of Periclean Athens. See 
below, p. 86. 

G 



82 



HISTORY OF AESTHETIC. 



other hand, upon his non-political relations with friends or 
with humanity. The new recognition of these latter forms 
of fraternity is a typical example of the modern breadth and 
audacity with which sentiments and ideas were now pushed 
to their extremes. 

But such general sentiments of community were not then, 
and probably never can be, enough to absorb and direct a 
life's energies. Therefore the problem of practice emerged 
in a new perspective and proportion, he question is no 
longer " What great end can be attained in a world which 
corresponds to the needs of the rational will?'' but, " How can 
the individual live decently and not unhappily in a world 
which is indifferent and may be hostile?" In moments of 
despair Plato 1 himself anticipates this inquiry, the theoretical 
relations of which are at once evident when we observe that 
the founders of Scepticism, of Stoicism, and of Epicureanism 
were all living at the same time towards the close of the 
fourth century before Christ, and that in popularity and in- 
fluence, the two latter distinctively ethical schools completely 
dwarfed the critical and positivist successors of Plato and 
Aristotle, and assumed the magnitude and importance of 
religious persuasions not co-extensive with any political or 
tribal group — the first considerable phenomena of the kind 
known to the Western world. 

By the side of this new personal ethic, which the Stoic 
based on the feeling of reasonableness, and the Epicurean on 
reasonableness of feeling, there was both in these and other 
schools a positive and naturalistic tendency of reflection. 
Theophrastus in the chair of Aristotle treated largely 
of plants and metals ; and, also, following a descriptive ten- 
dency already apparent in the Nicomachean Ethics, wrote 
on morals in such a way that his account of "character " was 
extracted and preserved for its own sake. Strato, again, the 
successor of Theophrastus, substituted the conception of a 
blind nature for that of God, and he all but anticipated 2 the 
famous phrase of Laplace : " Je n'avais pas besoin de cette 
hypothese-la." 

The same is true of Epicurus, and notably of his great 



1 E.g. Republic, 426. 

2 Cic. Acad. pr. ii. 38. Negat (Slrato) opera Deorum se uti ad fabricandu?n 
mundum. 



TECHNICAL TERMS. 



83 



follower Lucretius. Besides their persistent effort to reduce 
everything to matter and motion, the Epicureans seem to 
have made " the first attempt to write the natural history of 
civilisation," 1 and especially with reference to the origin of 
language they introduced conceptions which are of consider- 
able interest to-day. Yet while thus helping to render the 
world intelligible, they rejected the notion which the Stoics 
accepted of an immanent plan or design ; and we shall have 
to return below to their reflection on art and beauty, which 
for this reason, though by no means valueless, necessarily 
ignored the aesthetic problem as we conceive it. A physical 
theory traceable to Heraclitus was developed by the Stoics, 
as that traceable to the Atomist w r as by Epicurus. 

But once more, in the conflict of positivist and of ethical 
abstractions with the scepticism that was their counter-part, 
we meet with a growth of technical terms and distinctions 
that bear a modern aspect, and have in fact descended through 
later writers to modern times, in which they have hitherto 
been far more familiar than the less formal expressions of the 
older classical philosophy. 2 This growth of technical terms is 
characteristic of the time, and extended, as we shall find, to 
aesthetic science. 

Thus the actual names " Sceptic," 3 "Dogmatist," 3 and 
" Empiric," begin in this period to be bandied about, as they 
are to-day. The Stoics desire to establish a " criterion " 3 of 
truth ; an attempt which is an unfailing sign of logic de- 
teriorating into formalism. The term occurs indeed in Plato, 4 
but in a passing expression which alludes not to a test or 
touchstone of truth, but simply to the faculty or faculties, 
not restricted to either sense or reason, by which it is 
apprehended. 

And because of this same growing sense of division be- 
tween the mind and the world, we now find germs of the 
Conceptualist terminology which has descended through Latin 
writers to our own mental science. Terms which indicate a 



1 Prof. Wallace's Epicureanism, p. 117 note. Of course there is much in 
Plato and Aristotle to suggest problems of this nature. 

2 We inherit many terms of great importance from Plato and Aristotle, 
but those which are here referred to are a larger and later crop of peculiarly 
modern import. 

3 ^K€7rrtK09, AoyjXdTiKos, e/x7reiptK09, KpLrrjpiov. 

4 Rep., 582 A. 



3 4 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



complete or anticipatory seizing 1 or comprehension by the 
mind, or again an inward thought or notion 1 defined as a 
mental presentation and nothing more, take the place of the 
"form" 2 or "racial group," 2 which were the first simple 
designations for facts understood in their order and essence, 
and not yet distinctly contrasted as thoughts with things. 
The famous comparison of the mind at birth to a sheet of 
paper prepared for writing on comes to us through the 
Stoics; 3 and the whole simile from which such current 
phrases as "mental impression" are derived, although 
originating in a carefully worded illustration employed by 
Aristotle, 4 received the rough mechanical form which it now 
bears from the Stoics as interpreted by Cicero. The 
Latinised terms, which may be closely rendered as " Impulsion 
brought to bear from outside," " assent," ''comprehensible," 
"comprehension," "impressing notions in the mind," "a 
plain judgment (declaration Greek evapyeia) as to the things 
which are seen " (contrasted with a visual sensation attended 
by no such judgment) — all these modern-sounding phrases 
occur in a single passage in which Cicero is explaining the 
Stoic theory of sense-perception. 5 A similar relation of 
impact between mind and objects was assumed by the 
Epicureans, whose technical terms in mental science were 
in part the same as those of the Stoics. 

It may be added that many of the traditional names for 
grammatical cases and forms of verbs descend to us from Stoic 
investigations. 

And by the side of these philosophies, which might be 
called rationalistic as opposed to mysticism, though not as 
opposed to sensationalism, the Pythagorean vein of specula- 
tion maintained itself, and was reinforced after the Christian 
era by Gnosticism and Neo-Platonism, which almost suc- 



1 TrpoXrjxl/is^ KaTaA.77^19, cWoia, ivvoyj/xa, <pdvTa(Tfxa Stavotag, DlOg. L. in R. and 

Pr ;' ?° 3 * 

2 tSea, €tSo?, yeVos. 

3 yapriov evepyov eis airoypa^v. Pint, de Plac. Ph., 4, II, R. and Pr., 339. 
If, as I suppose, the phrase " tabula rasa" represents this expression, then the 
qualification " rasa " does not lay stress so much on the blankness of the 
paper, as on its state of preparedness to receive impressions — a nuance which 
has some speculative importance. 

4 De Anhna, 424 a, 18. 

5 Cic Acad. Post., i. n. R. and Pr., 398. 



PROGRESS IN DECADENCE. 



85 



ceeded in grasping the fundamental idea of evolution ; viz. 
that the derivative is not necessarily the inferior. 

If now we return to our former attempts at definition, and 
repeat what is certainly true in a philosophical sense, that the 
culture of this age is distinguished from that which preceded 
it by subjectivity and individualism, we must understand that 
we are speaking of a complex modern subjectivity, and a 
relative modern individualism. It is a subjectivity which 
in its sceptical divorce from metaphysic throws itself into 
materialistic science as one complement, if it falls into mys- 
tical intuitionism as another ; it is an individualism which 
separates itself from the narrow selfishness of the tribe or 
city no less than from its limited self-sacrifice, and in busying 
itself with the problems of reasonable pleasure is never far 
from the aspirations of religious asceticism. 

In the necessary progress of such a culture, one feature 
is most remarkable and most important for our present pur- 
pose. This is the extraordinary combination of subtlety and 
pedantry, of a technical language extended by widening ex- 
perience and an unspeculative petrifaction of the technical 
terms themselves, which first delights us at the advance of 
analysis, and then jars us by its superficiality. Ideas drawn 
from the great masters of philosophy become the catchwords 
of sectarian dogma or of rhetorical criticism ; but in this very 
loss of speculative fluidity they form a centre for the attach- 
ment of growing experience and deepening sentiment. Such 
an idea, for example, is the Stoics' il Nature," which had for 
them actually less ordered metaphysical content than for 
Aristotle ; but yet as the banner of a creed and the symbol 
of a juristic ideal became a rallying point for the new 
aspirations evoked by the extension of the civilised world. 
We shall find this curious contrast throughout the time we are 
dealing with. Observation, expressiveness, sentiment, and 
even partial theory, advance by the inertia of motion ; in an 
active and cultured society every writer refines somewhat upon 
the suggestions of his predecessors, and brings his own insight 
and conviction to bear upon the material laid before him. 
Obvious criticisms are propounded, meet their obvious 
refutation, and are re-asserted less crudely than before ; so 
that without leaps and bounds the literary world moves 
gradually onwards ; and even in the absence of that pro- 
founder criticism which belongs only to ages of organic 



86 



HISTORY OF AESTHETIC. 



speculation, reason slowly perfects its language, becomes 
familiar with important distinctions, and encounters life with 
a more many-sided appreciation. 

/3. How much was achieved in the period of 
which we speak rather by the dispersive pressure 
of humane culture than by depth of inspiration is especially 
apparent in poetic art. 

New and Latin i. The New Comedy of Athens, whose chief 
comedy. representative Menander is said to have been in 
youth a friend of Epicurus, must have presented a very strik- 
ing embodiment of the complex changes which have been 
indicated. Bringing it together, as for our very general pur- 
pose we fairly may, with the comedy of Plautus and Terence 
a century later, from which alone we substantially know its 
nature, we cannot but recognise in it a kinship to our modern 
feeling which is wanting in Aristophanes, and even, perhaps, 
in the great Attic tragedians. 

The removal of the chorus which had unquestionably been 
a hindrance to realistic dramatisation, and the division into 
Acts and Scenes 1 which formed an unobtrusive framework to 
the play, and greatly facilitated the comprehension of an in- 
tricate plot, agreed well with the new matter and tone of 
comedy as an unpretending but ingenious representation of 
common life. 

In spite of the conventionality of their characters, the plays 
of Plautus and Terence speak to us with the same simple 
human voice as Tom Jones or Vanity Fair while the splendid 
genius of Aristophanes has left us hardly a touch of family 
incident or of homely pathos, except where, in a literary 
satire, he drops a word of regret for a good poet mourned 
by his friends. A family drama of every-day events — and 
such, however incomplete in its portraiture, the new comedy 
certainly was — touched a chord which no Greek poet had 
sounded, except the authors of the Iliad and Odyssey before 
the peculiar development of Athenian genius, and Euripides 
as it drew to a close. The absolute distinction between comic 
and tragic interest begins to fade when we have in comedy a 
story of actual suffering seriously faced, in which the facile 
reconciliations that seem incompatible with earnestness are 



Due, it seems to be believed, to the Latin poets. 



SIGNIFICANCE OF COMEDY. 



not completely carried out. 1 It is not merely that the love 
intrigue or love romance (not always irregular), and the human 
nature of common men and women are subjects akin to those 
of modern literature, but that in the tone and treatment we no 
longer feel that hardness of naive egoism with which the Greek 
of the Ajax or Ion, the " Knights" or the " Clouds," grasped 
at his own advantage and repelled every interloper as an 
enemy, excepting when one of two or three great interests 
demanded the devotion which he reserved for them alone. 
Mere unmotived kindness has become a greater force. The 
loyalty of the adventurous slave to his master is not wholly 
selfish, and sometimes amounts to nobility. And though this is 
a motive known to classical tragedy — hardly to Aristophanic 
comedy — yet its central place in art belongs to a time in which 
the servile virtues were beginning to receive the recognition 
which Christianity finally aw T arded them, and in which Terence, 
a Carthaginian slave, could be a leading man of letters at 
Rome, as Zeno, a Phoenician stranger, had founded the in- 
fluential Stoic school at Athens. 

Thus, without any great creative impulse, the dramatic 
" imitation of life" in the new comedv brings into the light a 
fresh region of experience, and, as it happens, one of undying 
interest for civilized men. And in so doing art enriches it- 
self w^ith a larger insight into the beauty and goodness of 
common things, and with more subtle capacities of imitative 
presentation, thus gradually paving the way both for a wider 
range of beauty and for a profounder theory of artistic utter- 
ance. It was a great thing for Terence to speak the word, 
that to a human being nothing human can be indifferent. 

ii. And besides the beginning of humane comedy, 
the generation of Epicurus witnessed the birth of 
pastoral poetry. Nothing could be more profoundly suggestive 
than this of the change wdiich was coming over the world. That 

O ... O 

conscious self-assertion of individual feeling which has been 
called sentimental or romantic finds expression, still simple 
and healthy, in the Theocritean Idyll. When poetic fancy is 
coloured at once by the yearning of passion, the charms of the 
country, the sense of a beauty in art and song, and the humours 



1 So the Captivi, which is quite a serious drama of life. Aristotle's " No 
one kills any one " (in comedy) is clearly contemptuous. Cf. close of Much 
Ado, "Think not on him till to-morrow.'' 



88 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



of a busy and splendid town, we shall not be far wrong in in- 
ferring that man is seeking nature because he already feels 
that he is parted from it. A contrast of this kind is implied 
in all distinctions between the ancient and the modern spirit. 
Theocritus, indeed, is but at the starting-point of the long and 
eventful course which romanticism had before it. In him 
there is no sense of unattainable depths and inexpressible 
meanings ; there is merely the trace of a new sensitiveness 1 
in the imagination which indicates the germ of a new longing 
in the heart. And so the fancy of Theocritus is not wholly 
remote from life, and the songs which he ascribes to his 
Sicilian peasants are such as they still sing. The romantic 
Faust did not yet exist ; but the classical Helena was be- 
ginning to have strange dreams. Within a hundred years 
after Theocritus the first true love romance of known litera- 
ture was written in the Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius. 
_ . ^ , iii. And finally, beside the poetry of love, of art, 

The Anthology. . V . ? J > ' 

and of rustic nature, we find in the Greek culture of 
this period the poetry of poetry. In the Garland or Anthology 
("flower-gathering") of epigrams collected by Meleager just 
before the Christian era, we have not only to note the beauty 
of his own love verses, but to consider the significance of the 
fact that such a gathering should be made at all, and prefaced 
with the beautiful dedicatory poem in which the verses selected 
are compared to various flowers. A subtle feeling for poetic 
style, and more than that, something like a sense of historical 
continuity, are implied in this first garland of the poets, the 
earliest portion of that huge Greek Anthology which did not 
receive its last addition till after the Divina Commedia had been 
written. 

. iv. To treat the classical Italian poets, from 

Roman Poets. . r 

Lucretius to Juvenal, as merely the greatest 
writers of a decadence is a course that can only be justified 
by very carefully bearing in mind the peculiar purpose of our 
treatment, We are less concerned with the magnitude than 
with the specific quality of artistic achievement ; and while no 
sane man will deny that Vergil and Lucretius were great poets, 
yet most careful critics will admit that their strictly poetical 
genius, although indispensable to their greatness, did not 

1 For a necessary warning against exaggerating the love and observation of 
nature implied in pastoral poetry, see Mackail, Anthology \ p. 57. 



THE LATIN POETS. 



8 9 



constitute its central core in the same sense as with Homer 
or with Sophocles. Catullus, on the other hand, though a poet 
through and through, may fairly be ranked as a minor poet, 
not merely in the quantity of his work but in the limits of his 
inspiration. 

But considered as great men, endowed with poetic genius 
and conscious of representing the very heart and system of 
the civilised world, Vergil and Lucretius are examples of the 
art of a decadence all the more startling because in their 
powerful hands this art itself has greatness thrust upon it. 

All the peculiarities which we have observed in the fading 
genius of Greece are here revealed in their most emphatic 
form. 

First among these ranks a further phase of the influence 
which we observed in the New Comedy, a prevailing moral 
earnestness and sense of duty and of humanity. Strange 
attributes, it will be said, by w T hich to characterise a decadence 
of culture ! But as we have seen the reflective sentiment of 
morality w r as especially characteristic of this age, in which the 
individual was lonely in a crowd, and had to shape his life by 
his own common sense. And the atmosphere of serious 
purpose and goodwill which belongs to the Roman poets is a 
strong instance of the power which the natural progress of 
mankind possesses to place the lesser and later genius ethic- 
ally in advance of the greater and earlier ; while, in so far as 
didactic moralising or critical theology intrude into art, we 
have here exemplified that division of the mind against itself 
which marks the comparatively modern spirit of the time 
under discussion. Roman "urbanity" — the very word is sig- 
nificant — and Roman moralising satire, are not the natural 
geniality of Homer or the semi-political orthodoxy of Aristo- 
phanes. They are, on the contrary, the product of reflection 
and of a partly theoretical idea, and are thus analogous in 
some degree to the ethical protest and sentiment of Euri- 
pides. But they are more tinged, than his, with worldly 
wisdom, and arise not only out of a prolonged education 
through popular philosophies, but out of a mature experience 
of government and toleration among many creeds and civilisa- 
tions. 

And in this more humane atmosphere we are not surprised 
to find that the beauty of domestic love and life was at last 
fully revealed to poetic apprehension. Nothing, I believe, 



GO 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



had before been written like the " Torquatus, volo, par- 
vulus," 1 or the "Carmen Nuptiale" 2 of Catullus, since the 
parting of Hector from Andromache and his child was de- 
scribed in the Iliad. And Ovid's Heroidum Epistolcz, though 
no very forcible works of genius, breathe an atmosphere of 
simple affection in which our modern sentiment at once feels 
at home. 

And although only Catullus, and not Horace or Ovid, can 
be compared to Theocritus for freshness and reality of love- 
romance, yet the immensely increased range and subtlety of 
poetic expression in that province is a fact of the first impor- 
tance for the history of art. Love, for the poet, is now in 
some cases a matter of sentiment rather than passion, a 
delicate and even playful feeling ; sometimes, again, a pure 
and elevated affection. What touch of human interest the 
SEneid can claim, it gains from the romance of Dido ; while 
the variations of mood in the Lesbia poems of Catullus, with 
his description of Ariadne, taken together with the odes of 
Horace, form a gamut of emotional expression almost com- 
parable with that of Elizabethan song. From the lament 
over Lesbia's sparrow — a lyric which goes, I should imagine, 
directly to the heart of every nineteenth century reader — to 
the praise of the lover without fear and without reproach, 3 
whom a pure affection preserves even from bodily peril, all 
shades of romantic playfulness, irony, and seriousness are 
now commanded by poetic art. And if the playfulness of 
Horace appears to us, as indeed it is, a feeble thing contrasted 
with the passion of Sappho, yet we must not forget that there 
is something noble and civilised — something worthy of Shake- 
speare — in being able now and again to smile at the terrible 
love-god. Art, as w T e know from Goethe, and have since 
ascertained that w T e ought to have known from Aristotle, is 
the great liberator. 



1 The whole verse runs : — 

" Torquatus, volo, parvulus 
Matris e gremio suae 
Porrigens teneras manus 
Dulce rideat ad patrem 
Semihiante labello." 

2 Containing the well known passage, beginning, " Ut flos in septis secre- 
tus nascitur hortis." 

3 The " Integer Vitas " of Horace. 



NATURE IN VERGIL. 



9* 



And at the extreme border of the art of passion, we find 
in the Atys what, as far as I know, is the first poetical study 
of the counter-frenzy. This partly "dramatic" lyric, for its 
horror and pathos, and its sense of correspondence between 
the moods of man and of nature, might be the work of the 
very boldest among romantic w r riters. If, after reaching this 
point in the growth of art, we turn back to Aristotle's explan- 
ation of the pleasure produced by representations of what is 
unpleasant, we shall feel that it needs much stretching to 
include our charmed self-abandonment to the impetuous rush 
of Catullus' lyric, charged with the passion and desolation of 
a ruined life. 

Once more, this sympathy between man and external 
nature is seen to be gaining depth and substance. It is idle 
to deny that the Athenian and Ionic poets have felt the spell 
of the outer world ; but in the Roman writers the increasing 
subtlety and detail of descriptive expression, though still 
immensely short of modern landscape poetry, bear witness to 
a refinement of conscious delight in natural beauty for its own 
sake which is different in principle from the reference to it, 
as in Homer, by allusive epithet or illustrative simile. It is 
most significant that Horace should have thought it necessary 
to protest against descriptive insertions. 1 The principle which 
I am endeavouring to elucidate, that so long as art is alive 
its range of appreciation and expression extends itself by a 
natural process, in which the "apperception" of later artists 
is prepared by the recorded perceptions of their forerunners, 
could not be better illustrated than by a criticism which I will 
venture to quote at length, from one who writes of what he 
well understands : — 

" Everything, 2 then, in Vergil's history, shows him a 
genuine poet of the country, and at the same time no one who 
really knows his poems can deny that they fully bear out the 
evidence of his life. It is true that he drew very largely on 
other poets, and could not disengage himself from the ante- 
cedents of his art. From Homer, Hesiod, Aratus, or 
Theocritus, for example, come nearly all the passages in his 
works in which birds are mentioned. But though they 



1 Ars P., 16. "They describe the grove and altar of Diana, or a river's 
course through pleasant fields, or the rainbow." 

2 A Year with the Birds, by an Oxford Tutor, p. no. 



9^ 



HISTORY OF AESTHETIC. 



descend from these poets, and bear the features of their 
ancestors, they are yet a new and living generation, not 
lifeless copies modelled by a mere imitator ; and their beauty 
and their truth is not that of Greek but of Italian poetry. 
Let any one compare the translations of Aratus by other 
Roman hands, by Cicero, Festus, and Germanicus, with 
Vergil's first Georgic, and he will not fail to mark the differ- 
ence between the mere translator, and the poet who breathes 
into the work of his predecessors a new life and an immortal 
one. There is hardly to be found, in the whole of Virgil's 
poems, a single allusion to the habits of birds or any other 
animals, which is untrue to fact as we know it from Italian 
naturalists." I do not doubt that the passages on which 
Vergil thus improves had served as guides and starting points 
for his own observation. 

And with the love of Nature we must compare its comple- 
ment and condition — the feeling of city-life. The intensifica- 
tion of pastoral sentiment by contrast with the busy splendour 
of Rome, lending an extraordinary stateliness to the verse 
which this combined emotion animates, is distinctly mirrored 
both in Virgil and in Horace. The nineteenth-century 
dweller in a huge city, whether London or Paris, Berlin or 
New York, is quite at home in this subtle sense of comple- 
mentary pleasures, in which the simple charm of country life 
is really to some extent a foil to the recognition of supreme 
powers and interests — "res Romanae perituraque regna" — 
centred in the city. 

These two extremes therefore, the love of the country 
and the sympathy with town life — are there nobler lines in 
Vergil than the " Si non ingentem foribus domus alta 
superbis ? " — unite in a new and dominating form of feeling, 
not possible to the world in any great degree before the 
Roman age. The "praises of Italy" express something 
more than an affection for Italian scenery. They are deeply 
coloured with historical sentiment, the sentiment of national 
duty belonging to the head of civilisation — an emotion of a 
nature to heighten and be heightened by the appreciation of 
the picturesqueness in life and manners produced by the 
relations of Rome with all quarters of the known world. The 
feeling of the picturesque is essentially historical, and though 
I do not think that we find its advanced form, such as the 



ALLEGORY IN ART. 



93 



admiration for ruined buildings, in any ancient writer, 1 yet 
this is only an outgrowth of the relation to humanity which is 
really at the root of all delight in external nature. 2 

In any case, the feeling of a national " mission " by which 
Vergil was clearly inspired when he wrote of Rome, adds a 
new dignity and significance to all the external aspects of life, 
and communicates a fresh acuteness to feeling, and a peculiar 
majesty to expression. 

But we may notice in the constellation of Roman writers 
one sure sign of a decadence. The minor poets are the more 
complete artists. Lucretius and Vergil were, it might be said, 
too great as men to be complete as poets in an age whose 
mind was on the strain, and divided against itself. Much of 
Lucretius is pure science. Much of Vergil, though not arti- 
ficial in the most vulgar sense, as opposed to genuine or 
sincere, is yet dictated by practical or purely historical interest 
characteristic of the age, but incompatible with the simple- 
mindedness which belongs to art. 

Formative ^ e are not wr *ti" n g tne history of fine art, 

Art and but only noting some salient points at which, by 
Architecture. definite influences, the working idea of beauty was 
deepened and enlarged. It is needless, therefore, to say much 
of formative art and architecture, the tendencies of which fall 
for the most part within the lines of those which have just been 
traced in literature. But it seems necessary to mention a few 
definite phenomena of extreme significance. 

One of these phenomena is the prevalence of " allegorical " 
treatment in the painting and sculpture of the fourth century 
and later. Allegory, as I understand it, is opposed both to 
natural symbolism, such as that by which the lines of a flower- 
bud indicate growth and vitality, and to a deeply rooted tradi- 

1 There is an approach to the feeling in question in the famous letter of 
JSulpic. Ruf. Cic. Ad Fam., 4, 5, and in many epigrams of the first and second 
centuries B.C. See Mackail, Anthology, p. 62. 

2 The degree in which this definite historical sentiment may fairly make a 
difference in the charm of landscape as such is a very difficult question. 
Compare Vergil's "Praises of Italy" (Georgic ii, 136 ff, esp. lines 167 ff.) with 
the following passage from Ruskin, Seven Lamps of Architecture, p. 163 : 
" Those ever-springing flowers and ever-flowing streams had been dyed by the 
deep colours of human endurance, valour, and virtue ; and the crests of the 
sable hills that rose against the evening sky received a deeper worship, be- 
cause their far shadows fell eastward over the iron wall of Joux, and the four- 
square keep of Granson." 



94 



HISTORY OF .-ESTHETIC. 



tional symbolism, such as that by which the goddess Athena 
was connected with ideas of courage and of wisdom. As a 
rule, therefore, an imaginative presentation which is named 
after an abstract idea has an allegorical character. Of course 
there are degrees of this relation. Eros, the love-god, for 
example, is primarily an imagined person with attributes fixed 
by tradition. No one would call him an allegory of love, 
because he is more than a mere sign with content limited to 
a definite intellectual idea, The question whether the statue 
of " Kairos " (Opportunity) by Lysippus was 1 or was not 
strictly allegorical turns partly on the degree in which the 
conception was traditional — following for example, as is now 
alleged, the treatment of Hermes — and partly on the issue of 
fact whether it did or did not bear a knife, merely to recall 
the popular Greek phrase for a critical moment, "on the 
razor's edge." At any rate, the Calumnia of Apelles, Lucian's 
description of which is embodied by Botticelli in the well- 
known picture of the Ufifizi, must be considered as wholly 
allegorical, and it seems that allegorical figures representing 
such ideas as Virtue, Concord, Justice, and the like, formed a 
regular branch of sculpture in Greco- Roman times. 

Again, the ideal personification of towns, countries, and 
peoples, not unknown to the great time of Athenian art, takes 
a prominent place in the period before us. Such is the figure 
of " the Fortune of Antioch," by Eutychides, a pupil of Lysip- 
pus. 2 This further connects itself with the peculiarly Roman 
art of triumphal relief, in which historical interest is substituted 
for artistic value. And the full antithesis to abstract allegory 
seems to be finally supplied by the great Greco- Roman art 
of genre and portrait sculpture ; which, however, through the 
ideal or deified portrait, such as that of Alexander as Zeus or 
of Antinous, almost returns again into the allegorical region. 

In other directions an analogous variety displays itself. In 
the Rhodian school of sculpture we find a special tendency to 
situations of horror, cruel rather than tragic ; 3 at the court of 
Attalus in Pergamus the hostile contact with the Gauls re- 



1 Carriere, ii. 396, treats it as an allegory. Overbeck, ii. 107, doubts this, 
on the grounds that, a, the treatment was traditional ; j3, the presence of the 
alleged attributes is uncertain. 

2 Overbeck, ii. 134. 

3 A tendency showed by painting in this epoch, from Parrhasius downward. 
Plut. dc Aud. Poetis, 3. 



ARCHITECTURE. 



95 



suited in a new pathetic and characteristic interest, of which 
the statue of a dying Gaul, known as the " dying Gladiator," 
is a famous example. In Rome, again, towards the end of 
the Republic, the school of Pasiteles strangely combines the 
tendencies of refined sentimentalism, affected archaism, and 
anatomical observation from the living model. 

A certain development of landscape painting, to which the 
mural decorations in Pompeii bear witness, does not sustain 
the hypothesis of a direct appreciation of the beauty of scenery, 
which it might naturally suggest. It is a curious observation 
that " on all the walls of Pompeii and Herculaneum there is 
perhaps not one subject which can be positively identified as 
local." 1 This indicates that the sources of inspiration were 
chiefly traditional, although the capacity of these painters for 
naturalistic execution — as, for example, in painting fruit — is 
spoken of by modern experts in the highest terms. 2 

With reference to the position of architecture and the minor 
arts, after simply noting that such crafts as that of gem-cutting 
and gold and silver work, with the minute skill and subtlety 
which they imply, laid hold more and more on the interest of 
the wealthy Roman world, superseding the comparatively 
severe beauty of the painted earthenware vase, I may ven- 
ture to indulge the reader and myself in a somewhat long 
quotation from an author, 3 who best of all men is qualified 
to judge. I have found myself unable to express the essence 
of this passage in my own words either more shortly or more 
suitably for my purpose. 

" Now this question of the transmission of the forms of 
Greek architecture leads us at once to thinking of that of 
Rome, since it was by this road that all of it went which was 
consciously accepted as a gift of the classical times. The 
subject of the origin of all that is characteristic in Roman art 
is obscure enough, much too obscure for my little knowledge 
even to attempt to see with it ; nay, even in speaking of it, I 
had better call it the art of the peoples collected under the 
Roman name ; so that I may be understood to include all the 
influences that went to its creation. 



1 Art. "Archaeology," EncycL Brit., A. S. Murray. 

2 EncycL Brit., "Archaeology" and "Mural Decoration," Prof. Middleton. 
Cf. Poynter, in Lectures on Art, Macmillan, 1882. 

3 Wm. Morris, in Lectures on Art, Macmillan, 1882, p. 151 ff. 



96 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



" Now if we are asked what impression the gathered art of 
these peoples made upon modern art, I see nothing for it 
but to say that it invented architecture — no less. Before 
their time, indeed, temples took such and such forms among 
divers nations, and such and such ornament grew on them ; 
but what else was done with these styles we really do not 
know ; a frivolous pleasure-town built in a late period and 
situate in Italy, — which destruction, so to say, has preserved 
for us — being the only token left to show what a Greek house 
might perhaps have been like. For the rest, in spite of all 
the wonders of Greek sculpture, we must needs think that the 
Greeks had done little to fix the future architecture of the 
world ; there was no elasticity or power of growth about the 
style ; right in its own country, used for the worship and 
aspirations which first gave it birth, it could not be used for 
anything else. But with the architecture of the men of the 
Roman name it was quite different. In the first place they 
seized on the great invention of the arch, the most important 
invention to home-needing men that has been or can be 
made. They did not invent it themselves, of course, since 
it was known in ancient Egypt, and apparently not uncommon 
in brick-building Babylonia ; but they were the first who used 
it otherwise than as an ugly necessity, and in so using it, 
they settled what the architecture of civilisation must hence- 
forward be. Nor was their architecture, stately as it was, 
any longer fit for nothing but a temple — a holy railing for 
the shrine or symbol of the god ; it was fit for one purpose as 
for another — church, house, aqueduct, market-place, or castle ; 
nor was it the style of one country or climate ; it would fit 
itself to north or south, snow-storm or sand-storm alike. 
Though pedants might make inflexible rules for its practice 
when it was dead or dying, when it was alive it did not bind 
itself too strictly to rule, but followed, in its constructive part 
at least, the law of nature ; in short, it was a new art, the 
great art of civilisation. 

" True it is that what we have been saying of it applies to 
it as a style of building chiefly ; in matters of ornament 
the arts of the conquered did completely take the conqueror 
captive, and not till the glory of Rome was waning, and its 
dominion became a tax-gathering machine, did it even begin 
to strive to shake off the fetters of Greece ; and still, through 
all those centuries, the Roman lords of the world thought the 



ROMAN AND BYZANTINE ART. 



97 



little timber god's house a holy form, and necessary to be 
impressed on all stately architecture. It is a matter of course 
that the part of the architectural ornament of the Romans, 
which may be definitely called pattern-design, shared fully in 
this slavery ; it was altered and somewhat spoiled Greek 
work, less refined, and less forbearing. Great swinging 
scrolls mostly formed of the Acanthus foliage, not very various 
or delicate in their growth, mingled with heavy rolling flowers, 
form the main part of the Roman pattern design that clove 
to the arts. There is no mystery in them, and little interest 
in their growth, though they are rich and handsome ; indeed, 
they scarcely do grow at all, they are rather stuck together ; 
for the real connected pattern, where one member grows 
naturally and necessarily out of another — where the whole 
thing is alive as a real tree or flower is — all this is an in- 
vention of what followed Roman art, and is unknown both 
to the classical and the ancient world. Nevertheless, this 
invention, when it came, clothed its soul in a body which was 
chiefly formed of the Greco-Roman ornament, so that this 
splendid Roman scroll-work, though not very beautiful in 
itself, is the parent of very beautiful things. It is, perhaps, 
in the noble craft of mosaic — which is a special craft of the 
Roman name — that the foreshadowing of the new art is best 
seen. In the remains of this art you may note the growing 
formation of more mysterious and more connected, as well as 
freer and more naturalistic design ; their colour, in spite often 
of the limitation forced on the workman by simple materials, 
is skilfully arrayed and beautiful ; and in short there is a sign 
in them of the coming of the wave of that great change which 
was to turn late Roman art, the last of the old, into Byzantine 
art, the first of the new. 

" It lingered long. For long there was still some show of 
life in the sick art of the older world ; that art had been so 
powerful, so systematized, that it was not easy to get rid even 
of its dead body. The first stirrings of change were felt in 
the master-art of architecture, or, once more, in the art of 
building. As I said before in speaking of the earliest build- 
ing that shows this movement, the palace at Spalato, the 
ornamental side of the art lagged long behind the construc- 
tional. In that building you see for the first time the arch 
acting freely, and without the sham support of the Greek 
beam- architecture ; henceforth, the five orders are but pieces 

H 



9 8 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



of history, until the time when they were used by the pedants 
of the Renaissance to enslave the world again." 

It has been necessary in the foregoing review of the 
Hellenistic and Greco- Roman decadence to lay stress on its 
positive achievements, from which the reflective aesthetic 
consciousness of the time had to draw its material. I am 
aware that I run the risk of being asked whether I mean to 
deny that there really was a decadence, whether I have for- 
gotten the vulgar and brutal features of Greco- Roman civilisa- 
tion, and whether I imagine that the intellectual darkness, 
extending to the great individual forms of art, which followed 
upon the Christian era, was a historical accident unconnected 
with a moral and intellectual bankruptcy in ancient life. 

A thorough treatment of this question can only be attempted 
in connection with the philosophical side of our subject. 1 It 
must suffice at present to suggest that the features which 
indicate a decay in the civilisation of the old world are them- 
selves one great term in the set of contrasts which I have 
been attempting to represent. The spirit which was ulti- 
mately destined to burst the bonds of classical tradition began 
by to some extent reanimating it ; but that in the old life 
which could not be inspired with new meaning naturally fell 
into greater and greater corruption. And it was natural that 
the process of forging sensuous forms adequate to a new 
impulse should be tedious and gradual in proportion to the 
greatness of that impulse, and that during a long transition the 
spirit should be for the most part hostile to sense or the flesh, 
although the continuity underneath the transition was never 
really broken. Through all the surface conflicts of intellect 
and feeling and faith, the unconscious art of architecture, in 
which necessity blossoms into expression, continued to develop, 
so that the problem of reconciliation was solved by going on, 
and spiritual religion had found a sensuous manifestation be- 
fore it knew that it needed one. The degree in which, before 
the revival of letters, the tradition of the old world, whether 
in art or in speculation, continuously affected the new, is a 
most difficult and interesting question. But it must be re- 
membered that we are only now adjusting our historical 
consciousness to the conception that the Christian era marked 



1 For a statement of it see Prof. Harnack, Art. " Neo-Platonism," Encycl. 
Brit. 



PARTIAL PHILOSOPHIES. 



99 



no miraculous new birth of the world, and it is probable that 
the continuity of progress has hitherto been under-estimated 
rather than the reverse. 

Reflective In turning to the reflective aesthetic of the 
^Esthetic. Alexandrian and Greco- Roman age, we must at 
once admit that we have to deal, not with complete systems 
in continuous succession, but with tendencies fragmentarily 
indicated. Numbers of post-Aristotelian treatises on art are 
lost to us ; but it is also clear that true aesthetic speculation 
was not, and could not be, a matter of central interest to the 
predominant philosophies before Neo-Platonism. The theory 
of beauty can only be fertile for the thought which grasps life 
as a whole ; in half-systems such as Stoicism, Epicureanism, 
or Scepticism, there is no place for the belief that reality may 
find utterance in human feeling or fancy. And although Neo- 
Platonism was also a half-system, being fundamentally mysti- 
cal, that is to say, having lost faith in life and science, and 
being compelled for that reason to yield the sceptre to 
Christianity, yet just as Christianity, although a concrete 
principle of life, constantly fell into repellent onesidedness, so 
Neo-Platonism, though not a concrete principle of life, was 
profound enough to inspire a great mind for a time with a 
comprehensive faith in the reasonableness of reality. 

But partial philosophies are often definitely suggestive just 
because they make the most of the little which they acknow- 
ledge, and here Stoicism and Epicureanism are no exceptions. 
After saying something of these philosophies in their aesthetic 
aspect, it will be necessary to comment shortly upon the more 
literary and rhetorical criticism, before closing the present 
chapter with a reference to Neo-Platonic theory in the third 
century a.d. 

stoic • *' ^ to * c Pantheism led Chrysippus in the 

third century B.C. to the conception that " many 
animals have been produced by nature with a view to beauty, 
in which she takes delight, enjoying their colouring " ; 1 and, 
for example, that the peacock was produced for the sake of his 
tail, because of its beauty. Rash as such a suggestion must 
appear to us, who cannot find room in nature for any purpose, 
but only for causation, it has the merit of unmistakably 
signalising the fact and problem of natural beauty, which is, 

tToTC: ; ; ; ; 

1 x a ^P ovcra T V ttolklXio.. Plut. de Stoic. Rep., 21. 



IOO 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



however it may have come to be so, analogous to man's 
creations, and harmonious with man's emotions. 

" The universe alone is perfect," says Cicero, 1 quoting 
Chrysippus ; " man is not, though he has in him some particle 
of the perfect, and he is born to contemplate and imitate the 
universe." The mere laxity of the language seems to bring 
these ideas near to us ; we hear sentiments that ring like them 
from Christian divines and from nineteenth-century art-critics. 
To ''contemplate and imitate" might surely at least include 
to reproduce in plastic and poetic form ; and some Stoics were 
not wholly without such a liberal conception. Poseidonius, 
two centuries after Chrysippus, described poetry, almost on 
the lines of Aristotle, as "comprising an imitation of human 
and divine things." 

But this was not the ordinary Stoic meaning, and it became 
less and less so. They took the imitation of the universe 
rather in the sense familiar to us from George Herbert : — 

" Entice the trusty sun, if that thou can, 
From his ecliptic line, beckon the sky. 
Who lives by rule then, keeps good company." 

The mechanical view of imagination, the negative or 
intellectualist view of emotion, the complete subordination of 
" theoretical " to " practical " interest characteristic of an age 
for which practice had become chiefly an affair of theory, all 
these influences hindered the Stoic from completing his view 
of man's place in nature by an adequate theory of aesthetic 
expression. And at last, in Seneca, by a disordered reminis- 
cence of Plato which we shall trace among the Epicureans as 
well, the formative acts are reckoned as mere ministers to 
sense, like the art of cookery. The only true liberal art, for 
him, is philosophy — the art which aims at virtue— and poetry 
in so far as it is capable of being made a vehicle for philoso- 
phic ideas. For speculative purposes such a conception means 
a complete obliteration of all fruitful distinctions. 

Epicureai ^ e Epicurean school were opposed to the 

Stoic belief in Providence and in a reasonable 
kinship between man and nature, and therefore, for the oppo- 
site reason to the Stoics, but like them in the result, they dis- 
believed in the objective value of art as expressing a reason- 
able content. " Music," writes Philodemus, a contemporary of 



1 De Nat. Deorum, ii. 3 14. 



LUCRETIUS. 



IOI 



Cicero, is " irrational and cannot affect the soul or the emotions, 
and is no more an expressive art [lit. imitative] than cookery." 1 
This censure is aimed straight at the principal line of advance 
towards a profound analysis of expression which we observed 
in Plato and more especially in Aristotle. 

The aesthetic of mere feeling, resting as it does on the 
acceptance of simple facts as to what gives certain pleasures, 
joins hands with the opposite extreme, the aesthetic of pure 
form. I cannot assent to Schasler's contemptuous treatment 2 
of the powerful lines in which Lucretius refers the harsh 
scream of the saw and the musical sound of a skilfully played 
instrument to the respective angularity and smoothness of the 
physical elements operative in each case, and proceeds to 
apply a similar explanation to colours and to smells. Of 
course this assertion was for him but a guess, and it may be 
that in the two latter cases it will never be justified. But 
the difference between harshness and harmony in musical 
sound is a difference in impact on the organ, which is at least 
conveniently symbolised by difference of shape 3 in the graphi- 
cal representation of the impinging movement, and although 
a difference in sensuous agreeableness does not explain or 
coincide with every difference in artistic beauty, yet it is an 
essential element of aesthetic to understand the former, if only 
in order to show the limits of its connection with the latter. 

The historical hypotheses thrown out by the same poet 
in another passage 4 — that men learnt song from birds, and 
instrumental music from the wind in the reeds — are notably 
inferior to the aesthetic anthropology of Aristotle. Yet a 
pervading idea of human progress and a resolute adherence 
to physical explanations conjoined with a large sense of 
natural beauty, to which as in Virgil the movement of the 
verse is magically responsive, confer upon Lucretius some- 
thing of the splendour and mystery which belong to our own 
feeling for a beauty founded in necessity. 



1 I quote from Miiller, 2, 193 : ou8e yap fju/irp-iKOV t) ixovctlkt) fxaXXov r/~ep y) 
fxayaptKyj. 

2 Krit. Geschichte der Aesth., i. 210. Lucret., ii. 408. 

3 Cf. Helmholtz, Popular Scientific Lectures, Series I., p. 68 (E. Tr.). 
" Tuning forks, with their rounded forms of wave, have an extraordinarily 
soft quality ; and the qualities of tone generated by the zither and violin 
resemble in harshness the angularity of their wave-forms." 

4 Lucr., 5, 1378. 



102 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



Aristarchus and iii. The Alexandrian literary criticism of Aris- 
zoiius. tarchus and Zoilus in the third century B.C., must 
just be mentioned as contributing to the formation of a his- 
torical sense, if only in the inferior form of a canon or class- 
list of great writers, which repeats itself in later Roman 
criticism. 1 It would seem indeed that Zoilus must have 
worked rather to enslave interpretation by a captiously literal 
reading, than, like Aristotle, to liberate it by an intelligent 
allowance for figures of speech. The habit of recognising 
a " canon " of writers, with a parallelism, usually groundless, 
between Greek and Roman authors, was connected with the 
custom of classifying styles under three categories, or tacking 
on a single distinctive epithet to every writer — a tendency 
of which the more appreciative side is exemplified by the 
poetical introduction to Meleagers Garland of Poets. 

It is very curious that the distinction of the three styles 
was not merely applied to Homer's speakers, but ascribed to 
Homer as having been remarked by him ; 2 an idea which, in 
respect of the two extremes of a copious and a neat style, is 
really not without foundation in Antenor's remarks on the 
speaking of Ulysses and Menelaus. The formation of a 
medium beside the two extremes would readily suggest itself. 

All this aspect of literary and rhetorical criticism is apt to 
appear to us to be idle and tedious. But it helped to con- 
dition more important movements. 
Later Greco- iv. The rhetorical interest of the later Roman 
Roman critics. cr itics produced a substantially liberal appreciation 
of the aims of art, though it was for the most part not 
couched in aesthetic form. After all, oratory, like art, is a mode 
of self-expression ; and the comparison or confusion of poetry 
with oratory — formative art being by a stock simile connected 
with poetry — -emphasizes the expressive purposes and organs 
of art. Some of the criticism suggested by the analogy thus 
obtained between oratory and formative art shows a high 
degree of historical sympathy. Thus Dionysius of Hali- 
carnassus 3 in the first century B.C. writes : " There are ancient 
pictures, simple in colouring and without variety in the mix- 
tures of pigments, but true (akpi/3ei9, severe ?) in outline and 



1 Prof. H. Nettleship, in Journal of Philology, xviii. 230 ff. 

2 Cf. Prof. H. Nettleship I.e. w. quotation from Gellius. See Iliad, 3, 200. 

3 See Prof. Nettleship, I.e. 



CICERO. 



103 



possessing a great charm in this respect ; while the later ones 
are less good in outline but are more elaborately finished with 
varying effects of chiaroscuro, and have their strong point in 
the variety of mixtures." We have not the pictures in ques- 
tion ; but the description seems to correspond to the well- 
known difference between art in its youth and in its decay. 
When Aristotle said that all the work of the ancient artists was 
bad, let us hope that he was referring to a different period I 1 

But yet criticism was stereotyping itself and losing its 
vitality. Even in Cicero we find a tendency to brief and 
formal characterisation of the great painters and sculptors, 
though the writer is still animated by a real love for their art; 
in Ouintilian the originality appears to be less, and the school- 
book tendency greater, 2 while, to make a long story short, 
Fronto, in the third century, a.d., writes as if he had been 
taught a single epithet for each artist or poet. 

In Cicero however, in the work on the Sublime which 
passes under the name of Longinus, in Plutarch, in Dio 
Chrvsostom, and in Philostratus there is something more that 
calls for notice. 

Cicero was an eclectic in philosophy, and we are not to 
expect original speculation from him. Yet he was earnest, 
candid, and thoroughly well read, while retaining the power 
of direct perception that marks a man versed in practical life. 
Thus, when he presupposes the Greek view of beauty as con- 
stituted by an apt relation of the parts to the whole, 3 we see 
that this view had become a commonplace of reflection ; when 
he travesties 4 the Platonic doctrine of abstract forms by identi- 
fying the form of beauty with a mental picture from which the 
artist copies, which is apparently the same for a Zeus and for 
an Athena, and which in "our" minds is always capable of a 
higher beauty than that of the greatest work of Pheidias, we 
understand that he takes art so seriously as to identify the 
artists mental image with that supreme objective order which 
Plato precisely denied that the artist could ever apprehend or 
represent. We must not lose sight of the practical reversal 
of Plato's position for the better which this identification 
involves, while condemning the outrageous abstraction by 



1 Problemata, 895 a 35. 

2 For this judgment I rely chiefly on Prof. Xettleship. I.e. 

3 De Officiis, 1, 27. 4 Orator., cc. 2 and 3. 



104 



HISTORY OF /ESTHETIC. 



which the mental ideal is treated as though it were an innate 
idea, not dependent on genius, labour, and experience. 

And along with this seriousness in Cicero's estimate of art 
we find, as in the Roman poets, an increasing sensitiveness to 
the beauty of natural scenery, combined as in Chrysippus and 
constantly in modern times with a sentimental form of the 
argument from design. 1 There is perhaps a lack of distinction 
between beauty and use, but on the other hand there is some- 
thing approaching to a feeling for the picturesque and the 
sublime. 

And the absurd reference to a single abstract and apparently 
innate form of beauty is more than atoned for by the really 
important suggestion, " Seeing that there are two kinds of 
beauty, one of which consists in grace, the other in dignity ; 
we must consider grace as feminine, and dignity as masculine 
beauty." 2 

The subdivision of beauty (apart from so-called moral and 
intellectual beauty) into kinds is a step which I do not know 
to have been explicitly taken before this date. Aristotle can 
only be said to do it inferentially, as a consequence of the 
distinction between forms of art. It is a step incompatible with 
adherence to the mere formal aesthetic of Hellas, and is an 
essential condition of a more appreciative analysis. 

The work on the Sublime, bearing the name of Longinus, 
a man of letters of the third century a.d., and secretary to 
Zenobia, is now on the whole believed by the best authorities 3 
to belong to a date soon after the time of Augustus. The mere 
existence of the word v^os "sublimity," lit. "height," as a 
technical term in aesthetic or rhetorical criticism, — one of a vast 
number of such technical terms current in the Greco-Roman 
age, 4 — is a notable fact. The philosophical importance of the 
treatise is rather in its evidence that consciousness has be- 
come sensitive in this direction than in any systematic insight 
into the nature of the sublime. Nevertheless the writer has 



1 De Natura Deorum, xxxviii., xxxix. " Let us dismiss refinements of dis- 
pute, and look with our own eyes at the beauty of those things which we allege 
to be formed by divine providence." Rough rocks, caves, and mountains are 
named in this list of beauties. 

2 De Officiis, i, 36. Had Schiller this passage before him in Anmuth u. 
Wiirde? 

3 See A. Lang's Introd. to Havell's Longinus. 

4 Prof. H. Nettleship, Journal of Philology, xviii. 236. 



THE SUBLIME. 



elements of such insight. " Sublimity is, so to say, the image 
of greatness of soul." 1 " It was not in nature's plan for us, 
her chosen children, to be base and ignoble — no, she brought 
us into life and into the whole universe, as into some great 
field of contest, that we should be at once spectators and 
ambitious rivals of her mighty deeds, and from the first im- 
planted in our souls an invincible yearning for all that is great, 
all that is diviner than ourselves. Therefore even the whole 
world is not wide enough for the soaring range of human 
thought, but man's mind often overleaps the very bounds of 
space. When we survey the whole circle of life, and see it 
abounding everywhere in what is elegant, grand and beautiful, 
we learn at once what is the true end of man's being. And 
this is why nature prompts us to admire, not the clearness and 
usefulness of a little stream, but the Nile, the Danube, the 
Rhine, and far beyond all the Ocean." 2 " When a writer uses 
any other resource, he shows himself to be a man ; but the 
Sublime lifts him near to the great spirit of the Deity." 3 
Whereas then in statuary we look for close resemblance to 
humanity, in literature we require something which transcends 
humanity — a remark bearing closely on the place 4 of sculpture 
in ancient, and poetry in modern art. On the other hand, as 
showing that there is not really a definite grasp of any distinc- 
tive notion of the Sublime, we may note such a description as 
this, "when a passage is pregnant in suggestion, when it is 
hard, nay impossible, to distract the attention from it, and 
when it takes a strong and lasting hold on the memory, then 
we may be sure that we have lighted on the true Sublime." 5 

We may say, perhaps, that the writer. was fairly on the track 
of some such conception as that of the Sublime depending on 
an effort or reaction on the part of the mind, occasioned by 
some form of contest with the suggestion of magnitude or 
force, in which effort or reaction the subject becomes assured 
of a deeper spiritual strength in himself than he commonly 
experiences. The absence of any persistent attempt to drag 
out the essence of the matter by definition is exceedingly 
remarkable, and the writer's real strength is in his literary 
judgment and the selection of examples. 

In the discussion of style he betrays a consciousness that 



1 Havell's Lo7igi?ius, p. 15 (c. ix.). 2 Havell's Lo?igi?uis, cxxxv. p. 68. 
6 lb., c. xxxvi. p. 69. 4 lb., p. 70. 5 lb., cvii. p. 12. 



io6 



HISTORY OF AESTHETIC. 



sublimity has some connection with incompleteness, but this 
idea, which forms rightly or wrongly an important factor in 
the theory of Kant, he does not pursue to any speculative 
result. He is very much alive to the false sublime — frigidity 
or bombast — as proceeding mainly from over-elaboration of 
conceits, and is thus well aware that reserve and suggestive- 
ness are connected with the Sublime. 

And it is a notable sign of the times that Hebrew poetry 
here first appears within the field of Greek aesthetic. " And 
thus also the law-giver of the Jews, no ordinary man, having 
formed an adequate conception of the Supreme Being, gave 
it adequate expression in the opening words of his ' Laws ' : 
God said — what ? — ' Let there be light,' and there was ; 
' let there be land,' and there was." 1 

However philosophically incomplete, this work adds one 
to the distinctions which experience was revealing within the 
sphere of beauty, and is probably responsible for the exceed- 
ingly important part played by the theory of the Sublime in 
modern speculation. 2 

Plutarch of Chseronea, 50-100 a.d., attacks both Stoics and 
Epicureans, and does not, so far as I know, profess himself 
an adherent of any school of philosophy. For our present 
purpose the most significant of his works is a discussion of 
the question, how, in view of the base and immoral matter 
treated of by poets, young men are to read them ["hear" 
them] without sustaining moral injury. In spite of his 
moralistic attitude, the imbecility of some of his advice and 
interpretations, and the want of intelligence in his constant 
references to the arguments and poetical quotations of Plato's 
Republic, he has the merit of stating in plainer terms than 
Aristotle — owing to the accumulation of aesthetic experience 
during the long interval between them — the strictly aesthetic 
question : " Can what is really ugly become beautiful in 
art ?" No doubt he perpetually confuses this with the ques- 
tion : " Do we commend an act morally because we admire 
it in a work of art ? " which he rightly answers in the negative, 
but which is not a problem of aesthetic, but only of the dis- 
tinction between aesthetic and ethics. 



1 lb., c. ix. p. 18. 

2 It was first edited in modern Europe in 1544, and often since, notably 
by Boileau in 1674. See Lang's Introduction to Havell's Longinus. 



PLUTARCH. 



I07 



But he also raises the real problem in distinct terms — the 
terms of ugliness and beauty, asking in effect, " Can what is 
ugly in itself be beautiful in art ? If Yes, can the art-repre- 
sentation be suitable to and consistent with its original ? If 
No, how does it happen that we admire such art-representa- 
tions ? " I have framed the above question out of Plutarch's 
answer, 1 which runs thus : " In essence the ugly cannot be- 
come beautiful ; but the imitation is admired if it is a likeness. 
The picture of an ugly thing cannot be a beautiful picture ; if 
it were, it could not be suitable to or consistent with its origi- 
nal. . . . Beauty, and to imitate beautifully [which can- 
not mean to make a beautiful picture, but only to imitate 
successfully^ are quite different things." And " the reason 2 why 
we admire such representations in art, both poetic and pic- 
torial, 3 is because the artist's cunning has an affinity for our 
intelligence, as may be observed in the fondness of children 
for toy animals, and in such cases as that of the audience who 
preferred Parmeno's imitation of a squeaking pig to the real 

The mere looseness of Plutarch's language in this explana- 
tion seems to give his view a generality which places it in 
advance of the precisely limited analysis furnished by Aris- 
totle, through a reference to the enjoyment of inference. But 
Plutarch is still essentially on the same ground as Aristotle. 
He, like Aristotle, is speaking of the response of our intelli- 
gence to the artist's skill, not of the affinity between the 
artist's intelligence and the significance of the things which 
he portrays. The natural sense-perception i is the same, he 
expressly says, with that which the artist gives us ; that is, the 
latter owes nothing of its content to the passage through a 
human mind. The only difference between the two is in our 
concomitant knowledge whether the presentation is natural 
or artificial. This is for him the moral of the story about 
Parmeno, and excludes the interpretation that the audience 
preferred the ventriloquist's imitation because it was exag- 
gerated with humorous intention, which would be the natural 
explanation from a modern point of view. This example is 

1 De Atidiendis Poetis iii. 2 ^v^tzov. 7rpo/3A., v. r. 

3 Plutarch insists on this stock comparison to show that poetry being imita- 
tive, like painting, is not wholly responsible for the nature of its subjects. 

4 ^v/jltt. 7rpo/3/\., V. I j to avro rrjs alcrQycreuis 7rd6os ov^ 6/xotcos SLariOrjcri rrjv 

, brav fxy] 7rpocrfj 86£a tov AoyiKcos rj (faiXoTtfua 7repaiveo-#ai to yiyro/xeiw. 



io8 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



a strange counterpart to Kant's case of the nightingale 
imitated by the human voice, which, he says, becomes tedious 
the moment the deception is discovered. The common 
ground must be that we expect more from a man than from 
an animal, only in the one case we think we get it, and in 
the other we do not. 

Though, therefore, Plutarch does not help us to understand 
how art appeals to our intelligence, except in the mere fact 
of its power to copy, yet it is very remarkable that he thinks 
himself a champion of the intellect as concerned in the artistic 
pleasure of painful subjects, against the Epicureans, 1 who 
ascribed it to mere sensation without the countervailing pain 
of knowing the suffering to be real. But his only genuine 
advance upon Aristotle lies in the urgency which the problem 
of ugliness in art had acquired for him, as evinced by the 
very numerous examples which he gives of it (though not 
adequately distinguishing it from the painful and the immoral), 
and by the definiteness with which he states the strictly aes- 
thetic problem, "Can the ugly, if represented in a way 
appropriate to it [in short, without falsification], be beautiful 
in art?" In estimating the value of Plutarch's answer, "It 
remains ugly, but we rightly take pleasure in it by reason 
of the intelligence involved in obtaining the likeness," we 
must not forget that the power to copy is a phase, though 
elementary, of the power to re-create by intelligence. And 
therefore to recognise a legitimate pleasure in the skill that 
copies what is ugly, is the germ of a recognition that what is 
apparently ugly, but admirable in art, has something in it 
which the trained perception can appreciate as beautiful. 

Dio Chrysostom, a Bithynian (a.d. 50-117), a writer of 
popular lectures on philosophical subjects, makes in two re- 
spects a distinct advance on what we know of his predecessors. 

First, he 2 recognises the ideal for art, quite in the opposite 
sense to that of Cicero, as a concrete form in which the 
artist gives adequate reality to conceptions which before and 
apart from such realisation are not definite ; so that the result 
is not that after seeing the Pheidian statue of Zeus every one 

1 2u/x7rocr. irpofiX., I.e. The Epicureans, it seems, pointed out that the actor 
can represent suffering better than the sufferer can. This is the point which 
Plutarch, if a true art-theorist, ought himself to have made, but does not 
make. 

2 Dion. Chrys. de Dei Cognitione Oraf., 12, p. 402, Reiske. 



DIO CHRYSOSTOM. 



IO9 



can imagine something more beautiful ; but that after seeing 
it, no one can imagine the god in any other way. 

Obviously we are here on the track which Herodotus, with 
his naive profoundness, had entered 500 years before. A 
particular case of this conception is the treatment of the 
human form 1 as the most adequate visible symbol of the 
invisible quality of intelligence — a striking anticipation of 
modern ideas, in some degree itself anticipated by the Xeno- 
phontic Socrates. 

And secondly, Dio Chrysostom examines the commonplace 
comparison between poetry and formative art with a view, 
not merely to the resemblances, but also to the differences 
between them ; drawing attention to the larger field open to 
language both in the kind of ideas represented, as it has 
words alike for the sensuous and the non-sensuous, and in 
the time and action 2 included in its descriptions contrasted 
with the single moment and attitude into which the formative 
artist must compress all that he desires to convey. 

The above views are expounded in a criticism, 3 or rather 
panegyric of the Olympian Zeus of Pheidias, which reads 
almost as if the demands of Christianity were already stimu- 
lating the adherents of older creeds to demonstrate a spiritual 
and human significance in their own conception of deity. 

In Philostratus (first half of third century a.d.), author of 
the life of Apollonius of Tyana, and of the description of 
a real or imaginary collection of paintings at Naples, there is 
much matter of aesthetic interest. Two points are all to 
which attention can here be drawn. 

First, in the biography of Apollonius, the antithesis of 



1 Id. ib., Reiske, 404. I translate this remarkable passage, " No sculptor 
or painter can portray reason and wisdom as they are in themselves. For 
having no perception or experience of such things, but knowing for certain 
in what they come to pass, we make it our resource, investing the god with 
the human body, the vessel of wisdom and reason — seeking to manifest the 
imageless and unseen in the visible, which can be portrayed — better than 
the way in which some of the barbarians make likenesses of their gods as 
animals." 

2 Id. ib., 410. "We (sculptors) have to make each likeness in a single 
attitude ; which must be stable and permanent, and comprise in it the whole 
nature and quality of the god. But the poets may include many forms in 
their poetry, and ascribe movement and rest and actions and words to 
their personages." 

3 Dion. Chrysost. de Dei Cognitions Orat., 12. 



I IO 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



imitation and imagination as two co-ordinate principles of art 
is stated with the full consciousness of its novelty and impor- 
tance. Apollonius 1 is attacking the Egyptian representations 
of gods in animal forms. The Egyptian interlocutor retorts 
in effect, " How do you know your Greek representations are 
any truer ? Did your Pheidiases go up to heaven and take 
the gods' likenesses, or did something else guide them in 
their work?" ''Something else guided them — a thing full 
of wisdom." "What was that? You cannot mention any 
such thing, except imitation." "It was imagination that 
wrought these forms, a more cunning artist than imitation. 
Imitation will make what it has seen, but imagination will 
make what it has not seen." [This does not necessarily 
mean "the invisible," but may include it]. 

But secondly, it is more remarkable still that this opposition, 
which in its unmitigated form is thoroughly vicious — that is 
to say, when imagination is treated not as directing but as 
supplanting the presentation of reality — at once begins to 
shade off into the more modern idea of a mental (or, as we 
should say, imaginative) imitation. It is this inward imitative 
power, we are told for example, that makes us see the forms 
of animals in the clouds, 2 which are not really there, or see 
a negro face drawn in white chalk as the portrait of a black 
man. 

But though the opposition is thus mitigated, it is not 
destroyed. Inward or mental imitation does not for Philo- 
stratus amount to imagination. For us, however, in view of 
his instances, it is not easy to distinguish them. He 
keeps very far indeed from compounding the fantastic with 
the imaginative. Rather, it would appear, he finds true 
imagination in the invention and suitability, the higher degree 
of significance and expression, which he esteems in a picture 
above truth to nature on the one hand, and formal beauty on 
the other. "Any one," he says, "professing to describe a 
picture of Ariadne in Naxos, could paint a beautiful Theseus 
and a beautiful Ariadne, but the Dionysus is painted simply 



1 Philostr., Vita Apoll. Tyan., vi. 19. I quote from Overbeck, Schrift- 
quellen zur Geschichte d. Bilde?iden Riinste, 801, compared with Miiller, ii. 317. 

2 Quoted in Miiller, ii. 319, d\Xd pvq rovro fiovXet Ae-yeiv roaavra fxkv acrr]jxd re 
Kal o)S trv^e Sia rov ovpavov <£e/3eor#cu, roye €7rl ra> #ea>, i^uas Sk <pvo~€L ro yiu/x^TiKov 
e^oj/ras dvappvOjAL&iv re avrd ko\ ttouIv- 



j 

/ 



PLOTINUS. 



I I I 



as dictated by his love." 1 How invention and expression are 
brought together in his conception may be illustrated by a 
curious piece of sentiment which he praises in a landscape, 
where a male palm tree leans across a stream so as to touch 
a female palm with its branches, forming a kind of bridge. 
The recognition of sentiment in landscape is an important 
datum in the history of art ; whether in this instance the 
sentiment is of the best kind is a different question. 

This recognition of imagination as the power of creating 
an adequate expression for intelligence and sentiment, places 
the conception of Philostratus on a higher level than the 
idealising imitation of Aristotle, in which the difficulty in 
what direction to idealise is not coped with as a matter of 
principle. 

v. Plotinus, born in Egypt, 205 a.d., a pupil of 
Ammonius Saccas of Alexandria, taught in Rome 
from 245 a.d. till his death in 270 a.d. The tradition that 
Ammonius was an apostate 2 from Christianity on account of 
its hostility to the arts and sciences may serve to remind us 
of the varied influences under which Neo-Platonism arose, 
although it does not appear 3 to be ascertainable how far in 
fact Ammonius and Plotinus were acquainted with earlier 
Alexandrian speculations, or with Judaic or Christian theo- 
logy. 

It is natural to regard a non-Christian philosopher who 
writes in Greek in the century before Constantine as belonging 
to late antiquity ; but Plotinus has also been treated as be- 
longing to the early middle age. 4 The doubt indicates his 
position better than any decision. Neo-Platonism is a 
counter-part of Christianity, but in a disguise of half- Hellenic 
theory which curbs its freedom. It is, as we said before, a 
half-system, of the kind known as mystical ; which does not 
mean that it is too spiritual, but that, intending to be wholly 
spiritual, it is really not spiritual enough ; for, like Christian 
monasticism, it interprets the spiritual renunciation of the 
world in a material fashion. It shares however with 
Christianity the reaction against the still more partial systems 

1 Philostr., Imagines, i. 15, Miiller, ii. 324, dW'ovTos ye 6 AioVuo-os Ik povov 
tov ipav yiypoLTrraL. 

3 Erdmann, E. Tr. i. 237. 

3 Harnack, art. " Neo-Platonism," Encycl. Brit. 

4 Erdmann, I.e. 



I I 2 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



that immediately preceded it ; it rejects all compromise with 
sensual self-seeking, and has faith in a reality deeper than 
phenomenal nature, deeper than civic or national relations, 
deeper even than mind. Like Plato's Form of the Good, to 
which it corresponds in being above existence, 1 this Unity 
or Primal God is above reason, and above the life of the 
world, which two latter principles are identified by historians 
with the Aristotelian " intelligence," and the Stoic ''universal 
life." 2 As derivative, these two elements are necessarily in- 
ferior, and the adherence to this axiom of subordination, that 
the derived is necessarily below the original, distinguishes 
Neo-Platonism from a true evolutionary doctrine, such as was 
latent though not at first obvious in Christianity. 

But much as Plotinus renounces, in the way of knowledge 
and practical life, he refuses to renounce material beauty. In 
the directness with which it is perceived beauty has an ana- 
logy to mystical intuition which often makes it find favour 
with those who think methodic science too circuitous for an 
available avenue to truth. 

It is worth while to recall, in treating of Plotinus, those 
three antitheses by which we attempted to gauge the antici- 
pations of a larger aesthetic than were to be found in Plato and 
Aristotle. It will be remembered that each of these antitheses 
corresponded to a characteristic feature not indeed of Greek 
aesthetic theory, for as regards two out of the three Greek 
theory fell short of an aesthetic standpoint, but of Greek con- 
ceptions relating to the beautiful. We arranged them as — 

i. The antithesis of imitation and symbolism, corresponding 
to the metaphysical problem : "What kind of reality does art 
represent ? " 

ii. The antithesis of aesthetic and practical interest, corre- 
sponding to the moralistic problem : " Is the content of beauty 
related to the will in the same way as the motives of practical 
life?" 

iii. The antithesis of abstract and concrete criticism, corre- 
sponding to the true aesthetic problem : "Is the nature of beauty 
exhausted by the formal definition which identifies it with the 
sensuous presentation of unity in variety, or is a wider and 
deeper content traceable in it by observation and analysis ? " 

We saw that the limitations of purely Greek theory in these 



iireKuva ttJs ovatas, ep. vi., p. 509. 2 Erdmann, I.e. 



SYMBOLISM IN PLOTINUS. I I j 

several respects were intimately connected together, and it 
follows that no substantive advance could be made in one of 
the three problems without tending to stimulate an advance in 
respect of the other two. But the third being more directly 
dependent on experience and observation was capable of gain- 
ing considerably in depth and breadth of treatment during an 
interval in which speculation was unequal to readjusting the 
other two doctrines in conformity with this new analysis. And 
such an interval had elapsed, in spite of occasional gleams 
of philosophic intelligence, between Aristotle and Plotinus. 
Little of theoretical value either on the distinction between 
imitation and symbolism, or on the distinction between aesthe- 
tic and practical interest, has been adduced in our review of 
aesthetic reflection current during this period. And there is no 
reason to suppose that of the numerous writings which are lost 
any rose considerably above the philosophical level of those 
which have come down to us. Only in the later writers, such 
as the author of the treatise " on the Sublime," Dio Chrysos- 
tom, Philostratus, we find a tendency to recognise in so many 
words that art is not a mirror of common perception, but an 
expression of something great or reasonable in a sensuous form. 
Even this recognition, however, is so little elaborated in theory 
that it belongs rather to the deepest recognition of an expres- 
siveness beyond mere formal symmetry than to a doctrine of 
the relation between art and reality. 

symbolism a ' Such a doctrine we do find in Plotinus. The 
realisation, he is explaining, 1 is indeed always less 
than the idea, and the created less than the creator — this is 
the point on which he is still Platonic, and which makes his 
theory one of emanation and not of evolution — " but still," he 
continues, " if any one condemns the arts, because they create 
by way of imitation of nature, first we must observe that 
natural things themselves are an imitation of something further 
[viz. of underlying reasons or ideas], and next we must bear 
in mind that the arts do not simply imitate the visible, but go 
back to the reasons 2 from which nature comes ; and further, 
that they create much out of themselves, and add to that 
which is defective, as being themselves in possession of beauty ; 
since Pheidias did not create his Zeus after any perceived 
pattern, but made him such as he would be if Zeus deigned to 



Creuzer's ed., p. 1002. 



2 Xoyovs. 



ii 4 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



appear to mortal eyes." This passage leaves no doubt of the 
writers intention to take up the gauntlet thrown down by 
Plato in his "three removes from truth." 1 It seems natural, 
too, with Dio and Philostratus in our minds, to suppose that 
the truth claimed for the Pheidian statue is that of adequate 
symbolism for a god whose nature is spiritual, and not that of 
imaginative representation of a god who is material, though 
as a rule unseen by man. 

It is needless to enlarge here on the philosophical signifi- 
cance of this passage, which the discussion of Plato's position 
has fully prepared us to appreciate. It is true that Plotinus 
retains the self-contradictory conception of spiritual or im- 
material beauty by the side of the idea of natural beauty ; but 
as the latter is not defined, or not merely defined, by its 
relation to the former, but is explained in terms of other 
attributes, the value of the theory as dealing with material is 
not seriously impaired. " A beautiful material thing 2 is pro- 
duced by participation in reason issuing from the divine." 
This sentence sums up the conception. 

Plato's whole terminology is modified and re-applied by 
Plotinus in this sense. Material beauty is still an image or a 
shadow, but it is an image or shadow issuing from reason, and 
appealing to the soul through the same power by which reason 
brings order into matter. A portrait, 3 indeed, if it give the 
mere features and no more, is, as Plato would have called it, 
an image of an image, and thus Plotinus evokes from the 
Platonic view that deep aesthetic significance which we saw 
that it might really claim. 

Therefore the whole metaphysical assumption that art is 
limited by ordinary perception, which assumption is one 
with the imitative theory of fine art, is now broken through. 
It is henceforth understood that art is not imitative but 
symbolic. 

iEsthetic P. What, then, is the nature of aesthetic interest 
interest. or ] ove Q f b^uty^ anc i { s ft distinct from prac- 
tical interest or desire ? 

The answer is unambiguous and complete. In the material 
beautiful, and not merely in the cunning of the artist's imita- 
tion as Aristotle and Plutarch suggested, the soul recognises 



Rep., x. 2 Creuzer, p. 102. 

Porphyry's Life of Plotinus. 



UGLINESS. 



115 



an affinity to itself. This affinity consists 1 in the participation 
in reason and form, and is co-extensive with the beautiful. 
For the ugly is either that which being capable of rational form 
has not received it ; or that which is incapable of rational form 
and refuses to be moulded by it. Hence beauty is only in 
the form, not in the material, and this must be so as it is the 
form alone 2 that can enter our apprehension. The exclusion 
of desire for the sensuous reality from the interest in the 
beautiful is effected by this view of aesthetic semblance as 
thoroughly as by that of Schiller. 

Thus, in strict theory, the moralistic limitation of beauty is 
thrown aside, as we foresaw, together with its metaphysical 
limitation. Beauty comes to be regarded as a direct expres- 
sion of reason in sense by way of aesthetic semblance only, 
and is therefore co-ordinate with morality and not subordinate 
to it. I do not say that Plotinus would necessarily interpret 
his own principle in its full breadth ; that would depend on 
the limits which he might assign to reasonableness of form. 
In this interpretation he might be influenced by his ascetic 
tendency ; but there is no room for doubt as to the bearing of 
his philosophical theory. All that symbolises in sensuous or 
material form the laws or reasons eternally active in the 
world has a right, by this theory, to rank as beautiful. 

On the other hand, his conception of ugliness is defective, if 
we regard it as a defect to assert that nothing is ugly. For 
interpreted by modern views of nature, it would come to this. 
We know of nothing that does not in one way or another 
symbolise reason. We speak about "higher" and "Tower" 
laws, but we know of nothing in which law is not revealed. 
If therefore we mean to maintain that real ugliness — ugliness 
which is not beautiful — can exist, we must set some limit 
to the idea that all is beautiful which symbolises reason. 
Whether such a limitation can be maintained, and with it the 
existence of real ugliness, is a great problem of modern 
aesthetic. It was at any rate a merit in Plotinus that he 
stated the question so broadly and clearly. By doing so 
he vastly extended the recognised province of beauty, in 
agreement with the need for such an extension which we saw 
to have been practically making itself felt in art and criticism. 
In all probability, however, he would have classed as formless, 



1 Creuzer, pp. 100-1. 



2 Creuzer, p. 1003. 



u6 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



in accordance with the enlightened popular feeling even of 
our own day, which his theory fairly represents, much that 
trained perception ought to recognise as full of form and 
beauty, and much again, which may be really ugly, but can- 
not be strictly called formless. For in reality nothing is form- 
less. Logically speaking, he has confused the bare negative 
which is in fact a nonentity, with the positive opposite or 
contrary. It is not absence of form, but false form — confusion 
of the forms appropriate to different things and meanings — in 
which, if anywhere, we must look for real ugliness. 

Yet all these considerations are refinements, only rendered 
possible by the broad comparison of beauty and ugliness as 
representing the rational and irrational, in which for the first 
time Plotinus brought the whole subject under one compre- 
hensive point of view, capable of including the diverse forms 
and deeper sentiments of beauty which the age of transition 
had been developing. 

concrete 7- As we should anticipate, the identification 
criticism. Q f beauty with mere symmetry, or unity in variety, 
— the limitation which makes aesthetic purely formal — is 
broken down when the beauty of art ceases to be subordin- 
ated to the standards of ordinary reality. Plotinus repeatedly 
protests against the identification of beauty with symmetry ; 
and although the arguments by which he sustains his protest 
do not always appear to be sound, nor does he display a very 
consistent apprehension of any mode beyond that of mere 
symmetry or harmony in which reason can exhibit itself to 
sense, yet it is plain that he understood the growing need for 
a modification of aesthetic theory in this direction. I quote a 
passage which shows his main argument from feeling and 
observation. 1 

" Beauty is rather a light that plays over the symmetry of 
things than the symmetry itself, and in this consists its charm. 
For why is the light of beauty rather on the living face, and 
only a trace of it on that of the dead, though the countenance 
be not yet disfigured in the symmetry of its substance ; and 
why are the more life-like 2 statues the more beautiful, though 
the others be more symmetrical ? and why is an uglier living 
man more beautiful than a statue of a beautiful one, except 



1 Ennead., iv. 7, 22. See Miiller, p. 313. 

2 See above ch. iv., p. 45, on Socrates in Xenophon. 



CRITICISM OF " SYMMETRY." 



117 



that this (living beauty) is more desirable, and is so because it 
is more of the nature of the good ? " And he even seems to 
have taken up the thought of the Xenophontic Socrates, and 
insisted that "the portrait painter must aim especially at catch- 
ing the look of the eye, as the mind reveals itself in it more 
than in the conformation of the body." 1 This would certainly 
indicate a peculiar sensitiveness to the effects of painting, 
which, as Schasler points out, is significant with reference to 
the new relation which painting and sculpture were destined 
to assume in the later middle aore. 

Of course "vitality" or "expression" must be embodied 
in some kind of symmetry, but as symmetry is a much wider 
and less definite attribute than vitality and expression, it is 
plain that we have here a great advance towards concrete 
aesthetic theory. 

When however Plotinus supports his denial that beauty can 
consist in mere symmetry, by the argument that if so, the 
simple parts of a beautiful whole, such as dolour, lightning, 
the stars, could not be beautiful in themselves, whereas in 
reality a beautiful whole must have parts which are beautiful 
separately as well as in combination, he arouses a whole 
swarm of aesthetic questions — to do which is in itself a great 
merit — but does not escape serious confusion. To begin 
with, it is clear that a beautiful whole does not necessarily 
consist of mparts which are beautiful in isolation. Again, al- 
though, as he alleges, some things which are relatively simple 
appear to be beautiful even taken by themselves, it is not cer- 
tain that their beauty falls outside the explanation suggested 
by Plato for " pure" sounds and colours, which, of course, how- 
ever simple, have parts in which their simplicity is manifested. 
And further, it is not easy to estimate Plotinus' own explana- 
tion of the peculiar beauty which he finds in light. "The 
beauty of colour, which is simple, consists in its overcoming 
darkness by a principle which is immaterial, and is reason and 
form." W hether colour, considered as beautiful, is really 
simple, and is not rather, qua simple, merely pleasant, but 
qua beautiful, suggestive of harmonies and relations ; whether 
Plotinus the spiritualist is not, like so many spiritualists, 
fascinated by the idea that an imponderable agent is somehow 
more akin to mind than heavy matter can be ; and whether, if 



u8 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



light does conquer obscurity by producing lucidity, this im- 
plies any element of beauty deeper than those involved in 
order and symmetry, are questions which present themselves 
at once in dealing with this conception. Leaving these diffi- 
culties, which it is enough to point out, it must be observed 
that Plotinus' devotion to light is connected with the immense 
importance which Plato's comparison between the Sun and the 
Good had in Neo-Platonism, and that from a purely aesthetic 
point of view he falls behind Aristotle by the comparatively 
slight attention which he pays to music as a medium of 
spiritual expression. It was this, we remember, that so 
strangely and suggestively perverted the «*nime*ie~ terminology 
of Aristotle ; music, he observed, had a higher expressive or 
imitative capacity than the formative, arts. And in this con- 
ception, if freely interpreted, we safv a foreshadowing of the 
profoundest modern romanticism. For Plotinus, music is of 
course an audible symbol of inaudible harmonies, but it is 
beautiful only in a secondary degree as compared with paint- 
ing, whereas we should have expected that a thinker of his 
tendency would have developed the suggestion of Aristotle, 
and recognised music as a pre-eminently spiritual art. If, as 
seems probable, some superstition about the immaterial 
affinities of light was the cause of this 'non-recognition, we 
have here an example of the law that quasi-poetic imagination, 
when admitted into philosophy, blinds the intelligence to what 
is truly of poetic value. 

The creative impulse of Hellenic philosophy ended with 
Plotinus. For more than two centuries after his death in 
270 a.d. the schools of Athens remained open, but it does not 
appear that Proclus, who died about forty years before their 
closing in 529, and was the last considerable Greek philoso- 
pher, added anything of serious importance to the ideas of 
Plotinus, which he systematised. 

We have now traced the history of the Hellenic formulae 
relating to beauty, and have endeavoured to indicate not only 
the conditions of their formation and the degrees by which 
they were stretched and ultimately broken, but also the 
actual force that was at work in the concrete perception of the 
beautiful as it first strained and then snapped them. The 
definite antagonism of the sensuous and the spiritual world — 
the latter being regarded as something more and other than an 
intelligible system or better understanding of phenomena — 



" MEDIAEVAL AND " MODERN. 



119 



meant the disintegration of ancient thought, and the genesis 
of what on the great scale of world-history may fairly be called 
the modern mind. 

It may be indeed that what we thus distinguish as 
" modern " will one day be called "mediaeval," and that we 
shall learn to date perhaps from Shakespeare or from Goethe 
the inception of an aesthetic mood which is symbolic like that 
of the middle age, but without its arbitrary mysticism, and 
unartificial, like that of classical Greece, but free from its 
imitative naturalism. For the present however it is enough 
to note the original growth of that deeper and subtler con- 
sciousness, which however its antagonisms may be reconciled, 
can never, having once appeared, be substantially lost to the 
world, and which must for ever form the ultimate distinction 
between classical antiquity and all that in the most pregnant 
sense can be called modern. 



CHAPTER VI. 



SOME TRACES OF THE CONTINUITY OF THE ESTHETIC CON- 

i 

SCIOUSNESS THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE AGES. 

It is natural, especially for the Protestant peoples of Europe, 
to regard the Renaissance as the beginning of modern life. 
The long struggle for intellectual and political freedom which 
still gives the tone to our aspirations, appears to us to have 
had its starting point in the revival of Greek learning, and the 
awakening of physical science. And we have therefore been 
too apt to think even of the Renaissance in poetry and for- 
mative art as a new departure, stimulated from without, and 
forming portion of a homogeneous development rather into the 
times that followed, than out of the times that went before. 

But any such view is coming to be less and less approved 
by the deepest and most sympathetic criticism ; and thus it 
will be worth while (i) to put together some indications of a 
growing tendency in modern thought to pursue the roots of 
the Renaissance further and further back into the earlier 
middle age, before (2) attempting a very slight sketch of the 
intellectual attitude assumed by the mediaeval Church and its 
greatest thinkers towards formative art and the sense of beauty. 
Tendency to I - As the movement of the Renaissance in 
extend Renais- poetry and fine art passed from the productive to 

S2LHC6 DclCii 

towards the critical stage, it was natural that criticism 
christian Era. s ^ ou i^ £ rst turn j ts attent i on to tne later phases of 

production, which were in many senses nearer to itself. Just 
as scholarship travelled back to the Hellenic world by way of 
the Greco-Roman, and was long before it distinguished Zeus 
and Athene from Jupiter and Minerva, so it would seem as if 
aesthetic interest was first attracted by the full-blown and later 
Renaissance, both in letters, in painting, and in architecture, 
and only worked backward by degrees to " Gothic" buildings 
and early Tuscan painters. We all know the beautiful passage 
in Goethe's autobiography, 1 in which he supports the noble 



1 Wahrheit u. Dichtung, Werke, 17, 347-8. 
120 



THE PRE-RAPHAELITE MOVEMENT. 



I 2 I 



paradox, " What youth desires, old age abounds in," by his 
having lived to enjoy the awakened interest of others in 
Gothic architecture, the study of which had fascinated him in 
his youth. The art lectures of our own Academicians show 
the need of a similar retrogression. 1 We find in them, indeed, 
some slight references to Cimabue, because of Vasari's con- 
spicuous mention of him, but hardly a word of Giotto, and not 
a word of Botticelli or Fra Angelico. The Caracci's, on the 
other hand, are continually in the writer's minds, just as 
Lessing's criticism w T as first directed to the Gallicising poets of 
his own day. The brilliancy of the first years of the sixteenth 
century seems to have marked that period as the true point 
of departure, and attention was given by preference rather 
to what came after it than to what went before. The fall 
of Constantinople in 1453 furnished a conveniently definite 
reason, and in some degree a real cause, to which this great 
effect could be attributed ; and so the term Renaissance in its 
narrowest acceptation indicates the influence of Greek studies 
and antiquities on art and letters, an influence which had, 
however, in fact begun before the latter half of the fifteenth 
century, to which it is usually ascribed. Because of this usage, 
the word has often to-day a disparaging connotation with 
reference to the history of art and architecture, which is apt to 
perplex the student who interprets it more generally. 
Pre-Raphaeiite i- The present century has seen this tendency 
Pamtmg. reversed, at least in England, by the aesthetic 
movement, of which the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood was a 
symbol, but which acted in conjunction with many funda- 
mental impulses of the age, and, in short, with the whole 
principle of evolutionary science and history. It is quite 
plain that this general movement, which includes a strong 
bias against the assumption of purely extraneous causes for any 
development within a society, has shifted the centre of our 
interest in Italian formative art to a point rather before than 
after the close of the fifteenth century, and has pushed back 
its further limit to the first signs of change in the practice of 
painters, that is to say to the middle of the thirteenth century. 
As for architecture, we shall see directly that in it the later 
Renaissance may now be said to form the nearer frontier of 
our interest, while the remoter boundary has gone back to the 



1 Barry, Opie, Fuseli, between 1790 and 1810. 



122 



HISTORY OF /ESTHETIC. 



very threshold of the earliest middle age. But when this 
more comprehensive scope is given to our care for the 
Renaissance, the term itself has lost its narrow reference to 
the revival of Greek letters in the fifteenth century, and has 
been extended in conformity with its literal import to the 
whole movement and aspiration revealed in Dante and Giotto 
and their successors. 

centSy French n - This being so, however, the principle is COn- 
Literature. ceded that the European movement known as the 
Renaissance was not purely dependent on stimulation from 
without, and we are driven to trace its genesis yet further 
back than the time of Dante. We cannot refuse to see in 
the early French stories written as we have them during the 
thirteenth century, but older no doubt in their origin and 
circulation, a Renaissance within the middle age, 1 on which 
the signs of the new spirit are distinctly impressed. 

Mr. Pater's quotation from The Friendship of Amis and 
Amile should be read in the beautiful setting he has fur- 
nished for it 2 by those who desire to realise the many sidedness 
of the romantic sentiment embodied in these matin songs of 
modern Europe. We notice in them on the one hand the 
tenderness and sensitiveness of romanticism, and more es- 
pecially its delight in beautiful workmanship, the carved 
wooden cups of Amis and Amile playing the part almost of 
persons in the story ; and on the other hand we are struck 
by the outburst of passionate rebellion against a dogma, once 
spiritual, but now grossly material, and hostile to human 
feeling. Nothing is more extraordinary in view of our 
common notions about the Dark Ages, than the audacity alike 
of sentiment and of speculation that we meet with inside their 
bounds. 

One famous outburst of such audacity I think it well to 
reproduce from the story of Aucassin et Nicolette. It is 
the passage to which Mr. Pater refers as sounding a note of 
rebellion too strident for his pages. Aucassin is threatened 
with exclusion from heaven, if he makes Nicolette his mistress. 
" You will never," the adviser concludes, "enter into Para- 
dise." 



1 I am following, of course, non passibus cequis, the delightful study in Mr. 
Pater's Renaissance called " Two Early French Stories." 

2 Renaissance, Essay i. 



ABELARD. 



123 



"In Paradise what have I to do ? " is Aucassin's answer. 
" I do not seek to enter there, but only to have Nicolette, my 
sweet love, whom I love so. None go to Paradise but those 
whom I will tell you. There go the old priest and the halt 
and the maimed, who all day and all night crouch before the 
altars and in the old crypts, and those that are clothed in old 
shabby cloaks and old rags naked and barefoot and sansculotte, 
who die of hunger and poverty and cold and misery. These 
go to Paradise ; with these I have nought to do. But to hell 
I will go ; for to hell go the fair scholar, and the fair knight 
who dies in tournays and noble wars, and the good squire and 
the free man. With them I will go. There too go the beauti- 
ful courteous ladies, who have two or three lovers, with their 
husbands, and there go the gold and silver and the precious 
furs, and there go the harper and the minstrel, and the kings 
of this world. With these I will go, only I must have with 
me my sweet love, Nicolette." 

When we recall that these words were probably written 
in the lifetime of Thomas Aquinas, who was Dante's guide 
in theology, we begin to understand how deep rooted in the 
life of the age were the contrasts of dogma and romance which 
amaze us in the Inferno. " Le del cleir " — these words 
sound like an echo of the too famous personal history which 
so tragically embodied this antagonism. 

Abeiard. hi. For a little further back, in the first half of 
the twelth century, lies the troubled career of Abeiard, whom 
we are here to consider, not as a philosopher, but as the actor 
in a real tragedy, which must have deeply affected the feeling 
of the age, and as the writer of the letters to Heloise, and of 
songs in the vernacular which the Paris students sang. In 
the actual incidents of his fate, as in the mediaeval legend of 
Tannhauser, 1 we see no mere vulgar aberration, but a rebellion, 
relatively justifiable, against conditions and ideas which man- 
kind was not destined permanently to endure. The claim 
upon the sympathy of the age, which is embodied in the 
divine forgiveness as represented in the Tannhauser legend, 
must also, one would think, have been recognised in Abeiard. 
It has been well observed 2 that Dante, by omitting so familiar 
a name from the Divina Commeciia, almost seems to refuse to 
judge him. 



The comparison is drawn from Mr. Pater's Renaissance. 2 Mr. Pater, I.e. 



124 HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



Architecture iv. We have now traced back the signs of the 
a backto 0 sfxth n " Renaissance " spirit to the beginning of the 

century. twelfth century, before the sculptures of Poitiers or 
of Chartres, which are perhaps the earliest indications of a 
revival in the higher formative crafts, as contrasted with mere 
architectural decoration. In these higher crafts of sculpture 
and painting, as also in the highest of all arts, the art of 
poetry, it appears that a long period of barrenness or rigidity 
preceded the development of the twelfth and later centuries. 
For this we shall in part be able to account when we discuss 
the attitude of the Church. But the roots of the Renaissance 
must be pursued further still. 

For we must again insist on w T hat was alluded to in the last 
chapter, that the age of beautiful architecture, while it includes 
the centuries of which we have just been speaking, extends 
upwards in an unbroken continuity from them to the time of 
Justinian. In the later Renaissance, on the other hand, the 
tradition is severed, and whatever the merits or defects of the 
architecture that followed, it no longer springs organically 
from that which went before. 

It is quite natural that the great artistic craft which is rooted 
in necessity and does not intentionally represent imaginative 
ideas, should be the one to maintain itself through the inrush 
of uncultured peoples into Christendom and through the dis- 
putes and misunderstandings of a creed, prone to the heresy 
that the spirit is essentially hostile to the flesh. Including 
those crafts of decoration which do not necessarily deal with 
the human figure, and therefore escape questionings aroused by 
anthropomorphism, architecture was w r ell able to represent and 
carry forward the impulse of freedom and individuality, w T hich 
was one day to find a fuller expression in the achievements of 
painting, music and poetry. I have at this point no alternative 
but to supplement the quotation which I made in the last 
chapter, with reference to the architecture and decoration of 
the Roman decadence, by others from the same author, 1 
dealing with the early days of that " modern," or mediaeval 
architecture which sprang from it. 

" Spalato was built about 323 a.d., St. Sophia in 530. 
More than 200 years are between them, by no means fertile 



1 Mr. Wm. Morris, in Lectures on Art, Macmillan, 1882. Cf. Prof. 
Middleton, Encycl, Brit., art. " Sculpture." 



THE " TRUE RENAISSANCE. 



of beautiful or remarkable buildings, but St. Sophia once 
built, the earth began to blossom with beautiful buildings, and 
the thousand years that lie between the date of St. Sophia 
and the date of St. Peter's at Rome may well be called the 
building age of the world. But when those years were over, 
in Italy at least, the change was fully come ; and as a symbol 
of that change there stood on the site of the great mass of 
history and art, which was once called the Basilica of St 
Peter, that new Church of St. Peter which still curses the 
mightiest city of the world — the very type, it seems to me, of 
pride and tyranny, of all that crushes out the love of art in 
simple people, and makes art a toy of little estimation for the 
idle hours of the rich and cultivated." 1 " But, one thing came 
of it [of freedom in the realm of art at least] in those earlier 
days — an architecture pure in its principles, reasonable in its 
practice, and beautiful to the eyes of all men, even the 
simplest." — " It was a matter of course that the art of pattern 
designing should fullv share in the exaltation of the master 
art. Now at last, and only now, 2 it began to be really delight- 
ful in itself ; good reason why, since now at last the mind of a 
man, happy in his work, did more or less guide all hands that 
wrought it. No beautv in the art has ever surpassed the 
beauty of those, its first days of joy and freedom, the days of 
gain without loss — the time of boundless hope. I say of gain 
without loss ; the qualities of all the past styles which had built 
it up are there, with all that it has gained of new. The great 
rolling curves of the Roman Acanthus have not been forgotten, 
but they have had life, growth, variety, and refinement infused 
into them; the clean-cut accuracy and justness of line of one side 
of Greek ornament have not been forgotten, nor the stravino- 
wreath-like naturalism of the other side of it ; but the first has 
gained a crisp sparkling richness and freedom and suggestion 
of nature which it had lacked before ; and the second, which 
was apt to be feeble and languid, has gained a knitting-up of 
its lines into strength, and an interest in every curve, which 
make it like the choice parts of the very growths of nature. 
Other gain it has of richness and mystery, the most necessary 
of all the qualities of pattern work, that without which, indeed, 



1 Lectures on Art, p. 131. 

2 I understand the writer to be referring, in the first instance, to the decora- 
tion of St. Sophia. See Prof. Middleton, l.c. 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



it must be kept in the strictly subordinate place which the 
scientific good taste of Greece allotted to it." The w r riter goes- 
on to point out that Byzantine art rather made the character 
of what 'we call Eastern art, than derived its own character 
from what Eastern art then was, although the East had much to 
do with the new life of this which he calls the 4 'true Renais- 
sance." "But surely," he continues, "when we have sought 
our utmost for the origins of all the forms of that great body 
of the expression of men's thoughts which I have called 
modern art (you may call it Gothic art if you will, little as the 
Goths dealt with it), when we have sought and found much, 
we shall still have to confess that there is no visible origin for 
the thing that gave life to those forms. All we can say is, that 
w T hen the Roman tyranny grew sick, when that recurring curse 
of the world, a dominant race, began for a time to be shaken 
from its hold, men began to long for the freedom of art ; and 
that even amid the confusion and rudeness of a time when 
one civilisation was breaking up that another might be born 
of it, the mighty impulse which this longing gave to the ex- 
pression of thought created a glorious art, full of growth and 
hope, in the only form which at such a time art could take — 
architecture to wit — which of all the forms of art is that which 
springs direct from popular impulse, from the partnership of 
all men, great and little, in worthy and exalting aspirations. 
So was modern or Gothic art created, and never till the time of 
that death or cataleptic sleep of the so-called Renaissance, did 
it forget its origin." 

Here, we are to observe, the art of the sixth century a.d. 
is referred to as the sign of " the true Renaissance," which 
does not mean a rebirth of " classical " forms, but rather a re- 
birth of the human spirit in a vesture entirely new, though 
woven out of the robes it had laid aside. We must bear in 
mind, however, that great works of individual origination in 
the expressive arts are not to be found during the six centuries 
which we have just traversed so lightly; and although it is 
not hard to explain this phenomenon, yet it cannot be explained 
away. 

Christian Art v. But we may go at least one step further. 
and eSfest %he " As if m anticipation of the sixteenth century, the 
centuries. Church was becoming humanistic, in a best and 
earliest Renaissance." This saying of the same writer 1 who 



Mr. Pater, Mar his the Epicurean, vol. ii. 141. 



BEFORE CONSTANTINE. 



127 



pointed us to the French or Provencal Renaissance of early 
romance, refers to the second century of our era — the minor 
" peace of the Church" under the Antonines. At this time, 
it is suggested, before those conflicts of body and soul which 
preceded or characterised the later " peace of the Church" 
under Constantine, she was " truer than perhaps she ever 
would be again to that element of profound serenity in the 
soul of her founder, which reflected the eternal goodwill of 
God to man, ' in whom,' according to the oldest version of 
the angelic message, ' He is well pleased !' " 

The signs which indicate some such frame of mind in the 
Church before Constantine appear to be : — 

a. The allusions from which an early development of litur- 
gical music, analogous to that described by Augustine as 
recently introduced at Milan, may be inferred to reach back, 
though in less ceremonial forms, 1 to New Testament times. 

b. The remains of early Christian painting in the cata- 
combs, of which some part may belong to very early years, 
though the more complete frescoes probably come down to 
the fourth century. What is remarkable in these oldest relics 
of Christian art is in the first place the complete adoption of 
a simple symbolism, resting partly on Scripture and partly on 
natural allegory, in which the cross, the lamb, the fish, 2 the 
stag (after the Psalm, " As the hart panteth "), and the 
phcenix or peacock, all stand directly for ideas belonging to 
the faith, symbols such as these having for unlettered minds 
an extraordinary power of comfort and fascination, when they 
have become the vehicles of a common experience and a 
common hope. And in the second place, as pictorial capacity 
increases among the Christians, there arises the habit of repre- 
senting scenes from the life of Jesus, never in childhood nor 
in suffering, but always as a godlike man in some happy or 
triumphant activity, as the Good Shepherd (with an echo of 
Hermes), or in the entrance into Jerusalem, or even before 
Pilate ; or again, as the teacher among His disciples, or under 
the form of Orpheus, who also overcame death, and tamed the 



1 The Council of Laodicea, 367 a.d., restricted singing in church to the 
trained choir. Carriere, iii. 94 ff. 

2 The first letters of the Greek words for Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour, 
form the Greek word for fish. 



128 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



fiercest creatures, in a Phrygian cap, playing the lyre among 
wild beasts. 1 

c. The hymns and sacred poetry of the early Church do 
not appear to have attained independent poetical rank, 2 but, 
beginning with some verses quoted or written by Clement of 
Alexandria in the end of the second century, and going on 
through Nazianzen in the fourth century and Synesius in the 
fifth, they evince 3 a completely new force and freedom in, so 
to speak, taking possession of the universe with all its strength 
and majesty, as something that shares, in its degree, man's 
relation to the Creator. This relation does not appear to be 
either argumentatively or fantastically conceived ; it is rather 
directly and simply felt, as the content of a faith and a ground 
for prayer. The Hebrew Scriptures, especially the Psalms, 
no doubt had a profound influence on this mood and its ex- 
pression ; but the doctrine of the incarnation, which seems 
generally to be near at hand in these hymns, immensely 
strengthens what I have ventured to call the sense of posses- 
sion or proprietorship which replaces for the Christian the 
Judaic sense of inaccessibility or remoteness in the Creator. 
In this feeling, which is very strongly marked in the Synoptic 
Gospels, we unquestionably have one and that the most 
fundamental note of the Christian attitude towards beauty. 
But yet Christian art had far to go and much to suffer before 
it could realise this aspiration of its early days. 

It is worth while to adduce two quotations from the prose 
literature of the fourth century, which show first the pro- 
found sense of unity with the world that survived down to 
that time among Christians ; and secondly, this same unity 
just beginning to rend itself in the long struggle which was 
probably unavoidable if its full depth was ever to be realised. 

Gregory of Nyssa writes : "When I see every hilltop, every 
valley, every plain covered with fresh sprung grass, and then 
the various array of the trees, and at my feet the lilies, doubly 
furnished by nature, both with pleasant scent and with beauty 



1 See an elaborate treatment of early Christianity in all its aesthetic aspects 
in Carriere, iii., 77-138, and cf. for the catacombs, Prof. Middleton, in Encycl. 
Brit., " Mural Decoration." 

2 It is now thought that Gregory of Nazianzus was not the author of the 
Euripidean tragedy on " the suffering Christ," which used to be ascribed to 
him. See his life, Encycl. Brit. 

3 I judge from the translations in Carriere, I.e. 



SYMPATHY WITH NATURE. 



I2 9 



of colour ; when in the distance I behold the sea, to which the 
wandering cloud leads the way, my mind is seized by a melan- 
choly which is not without happiness ; and when in autumn 
the fruits [corn ?] disappear, the leaves fall and the boughs are 
left bare, we are absorbed in the thought of the eternal and 
continuously recurring change in the accord of the marvellous 
forces of nature. Whoever apprehends this with the intelli- 
gent eye of the soul, feels the littleness of man compared with 
the greatness of the universe." And Chrysostom : " When 
you look at gleaming buildings, and the aspect of colonnades 
allures your eye, then turn at once to the vault of heaven and 
to the free plains in which herds graze at the water's brink. 
Who does not despise all the creations of art when at dawn in 
the stillness of his heart' he admires the rising sun, as it sheds 
its golden light over the earth ; or, when resting by a spring 
in the deep grass or under the dark shade of thick-leaved 
trees, he feasts his eye on the far distance vanishing in the 
haze ?" 

I do not think that we can be mistaken in saying that these 
passages show a sympathy with nature which is quite of a 
modern type. But in both of them this feeling is beginning 
to turn against the sense of worth in man and his productions, 
and so doing to cut at its own root. Nothing could be more 
pregnant than this opposition, more especially in the second 
passage, where it is specifically directed against architecture, 
the non-imitative art. On the one hand it emphasises unmis- 
takably a new attitude of aesthetic perception to external 
nature, the like of which we have not found in any Hellenic 
or Greco- Roman writer, but on the other hand it betrays 
a faint shadow of that hostility to artificial beauty which 
maimed the higher imaginative arts in the middle age, and 
in doing so, deadened in the end man's sensibility even to 
natural loveliness. 

There is ground, then, for the suggestion which finds the 
earliest Renaissance in the earliest age of peace experienced 
by the Christian Church after it became a completed organ- 
ism ; 1 and it is not to be denied that the Founder of Christi- 
anity 2 looked out upon the external world with free and 

1 See Marius the Epicurean, ii. 135. 

2 I doubt whether such disinterested apprehension of floral beauty — so 
free from moralising or allegory — as that of the text, " Consider the lilies of 
the field," can be found outside, or prior to, the Christian intelligence. 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



friendly eyes, or that the ultimate tendency of this religion is 
to make man feel that the world and he himself are parallel 
expressions of one and the same Divinity. 

„ , vi. But yet there seems to be another side to 

Necessity of an .J _ 

interval of this question. 1 he halt- Hellenic cheerfulness, in 
Austerity. su |3j ects anc ( treatment, of the catacomb-paintings, 
the abounding grace and force of some early Christian sculp- 
tures, 1 and the naive devotion of the early hymns and sacred 
odes, could scarcely perhaps have led by direct development 
to so great a range and depth of characterisation, as that 
which reveals itself in the twelfth century and after. The 
later dogmatic and ascetic tendency may no doubt be said to 
have laid fetters on the highest uses of art ; but was it not 
necessary that the opposition between the spirit and the flesh 
should be pushed to the furthest point, both within the realm 
of art, and between art and dogma, in order that the entire 
gamut of expression might be mastered, and that the arduous- 
ness of the task, to represent all that there is in man, might not 
be understated ? If the God-like or heroic Christ had never 
passed into the man of sorrows, if crucifixions and martyr- 
doms and the forms of emaciated ascetics had never been 
brought within the range of representation, would not an 
element have been wanting to the complex expressiveness of 
Botticelli and Leonardo, and to the modern feeling, which is 
our peculiar pride, for a beauty as wide as life ? And if no 
party in the Church had maintained, and no Council had 
decided, that " Christ in His glorified humanity was . . . too 
exalted to be figured by human art in an earthly material, 
after the analogy of any other human body," 2 would there 
have existed, when imagination at length came to its rights, 
the full sense of mystery which Raphael, for example, em- 
bodied in the Divine^ child of the Sistine Madonna? It is 
said that the Christian painters attained a mastery over the 
expression of the face long before they could deal adequately 
with the figure, whereas with Greek sculptors the order was 
the reverse of this. Such a contrast, which is certainly char- 
acteristic, only applies to the Christian art of a later age, and 
not to that of the first four centuries. 

But none the less it is true that the re-birth of humanity 

1 Carriere, iii. 114. Prof. Middleton in EncycL Brit., art. "Sculpture." 

2 Council of 754, not oecumenical. EncycL Brit., art. " Image-worship." 



CHRISTIAN DUALISM. I 3 I 

began with the Christian era, or rather, as we said in the last 
chapter, long before it ; and the apparent aberrations of the 
later middle age were but necessary grades in the process 
which vindicated the full breadth and intensity of the human 
ideal. 

intellectual 2. The profound conception of Plotinus, which 
Stneticfrom finally destroyed the theoretical restriction of 
piotinus. beauty to formal symmetry and of art to imita- 
tion, was essentially maintained — whether or no in direct 
inheritance from its author — by the intellectual consciousness 
of Christendom. It was, as we have seen, only an application 
of the thought of Plato, for which everything visible or 
material was a sign or counterpart of something invisible or 
immaterial. In a dialogue 1 of Scotus Erigena, who might 
be called the last Neo-Platonist and the first Scholastic, 2 the 
" teacher" says, " Consider whether these local and temporal 
recurrences of the parts of this visible universe are devoid of 
a certain mystery or not," to which the " disciple" replies, 
" I could not readily affirm that they are devoid of mystery ; 
for there is nothing, as I think, of visible and corporeal 
objects which does not signify somewhat incorporeal and 
[purely] intelligible." Scholastic disputes about the logical 
or metaphysical existence of universals do not touch this 
fundamental conviction, which, formulated by Plato after the 
great age of Hellenic art, sank deep into the European intellect 
under the influence of the so-called decadence, including the 
birth of Christianity, and governed the modern perception of 
beauty till rationalised by the later Renaissance. For the 
time, therefore, the consciousness of Christendom was dualistic, 
as opposed to the naturalistic monism of the ordinary Hellenic 
creed before Plato. But the Christian dualism was only the 
outward sign of an arduous struggle to realise a higher or 
spiritual monism. From the first and throughout history a 
sense of reconciliation was active in the Christian faith, how- 
ever militant. 

Thus the slight indications of the mediaeval attitude to- 
wards beauty, which are all that can be dealt with here, 
appear to indicate a remarkable circuit of theory, beginning 
with a special sympathy for nature as opposed to the works of 



1 De Divisione Mundi, § 3, ninth century. 

2 Art. " Scholasticism," Encycl, Brit. 



132 



HISTORY OF AESTHETIC. 



man in the Christian successors of Plotinus (in the same age 
which adopted evolutionary monism as the root of orthodox 
theology), passing through a phase of hostility to the higher 
and more human arts in the destruction of Paganism and the 
iconoclastic controversy, and ending with a complete recogni- 
tion of a more significant beauty as the manifestation of the 
Divine both through art and nature in the age of St. Francis, 
St. Thomas, Dante, and Giotto. 

This whole circuit is determined, as constantly happens 
with dualistic theories, by a shifting location in empirical 
reality of the two factors which constitute the dualism. The 
underlying conception is that nature and art, belonging to 
the visible 1 universe, are beautiful if and in as far as they 
worthily symbolise the Divine power and goodness, and con- 
sequently do not appeal to sensuous interest or desire. But 
their respective fitness for this purpose is differently judged 
at different times, and the course of this judgment reminds us 
in some degree of Plato's speculation, especially when nature 
is reckoned as nearer to the creative original than art, when 
art is condemned as unable to portray divinity, or when all 
beauty, whether of nature or of art, is rejected as a mere 
stimulus to sense. There seems always, however, to be in 
the background, more positively than in Plato, at least the 
conditional admission that material beauty is divine, if rightly 
and purely seen. 

From Emanation i- We should note, to begin with, that in the 
to Evolution, f our th century, some two generations after the 
death of Plotinus, the great step from emanation to evolu- 
tion was irrevocably made by Christian dogma in the settle- 
ment of the Homoousian dispute. Whether this idea is or 
is not in the sense of the Synoptic Gospels, it certainly marks 
the final and essential abandonment of heathenism, and the 
climax to which Platonism and Neo-Platonism had gradually 
been approximating. There can be developed, it affirms, out 
of the one supreme principle of the world, a progressive and 
active content, which does not lose anything, nor become 



1 The extraordinary prominence given to the sense of sight in this anti- 
thesis from Plato downwards necessarily governs our terminology, and theory 
has sometimes, as we shall see in St. Thomas, suffered from this prominence, 
which arises both from obvious reasons in the nature of the sense, and prob- 
ably also from the metaphysical convenience of analogies founded on it as 
well as from historical causes. 



DISTRUST OF ART. 



133 



secondary, by the fact of this development. However verbal 
or pedantic this may appear to us to-day, it is, if contrasted 
with the ideas of the greatest Greeks, excepting perhaps 
Aristotle, a necessary protest against a pessimistic limitation. 
It denies the rule of progress to be that the first is best, the 
second a little less perfect, and the third more imperfect still. 
Dualism and Love h. And thus we saw how in this fourth century 
of Nature, fafe Chrysostom and Gregory of Nyssa, like the 
early Christian hymn-writers, fully recognised the beauty of 
material nature as the direct work and symbol of Divinity, 
and even accented this recognition by a tendency to dis- 
parage, in comparison, the works of man. As early, indeed, 
as the year 306 a.d. a Spanish Synod 1 had decided that 
"pictures ought not to be in a church, lest that which is 
worshipped and adored be painted on walls," and the genesis 
of iconoclasm goes back in part to the Decalogue and the 
Judaic element in Christianity. In the language of philo- 
sophy this tendency of the fourth century a.d. means that the 
dualism between sense and spirit is first asserting itself in 
antagonism to what is most plainly of human origin, as in 
the modern sentiment that " God made the country and man 
made the town." Audaciously as this antithesis inverts the 
true relation of things, it performs a temporary service to 
culture by forcing into prominence the charm of external 
nature. But such an effect, if isolated, must be transient ; 
a dualism which condemns the beauty fixed in art must soon 
threaten the sense of a beauty perceivable in nature. Before 
this comes to pass, however, the momentary situation leaves 
a permanent result in Augustine's account of beauty, dealing, 
as is natural from his theological position, rather with the 
world than with fine art, which he, like others of his time, 
was beginning to distrust. 2 

Augustine ^ n ^ S ear l y n ^ e ' ne te ^ s us > 3 ne naC ^ wr itten 

on "Beauty of books on the Beautiful and Fit, about which writ- 
ings he now no longer cared, nor knew whether 

1 Synod of Elvira. Art. " Image-worship," Encycl. Brit. 

2 Augustine lived 354-430 a.d. He expressed disapproval of looking for 
Christ on painted walls rather than in the written word. There is a letter 
ascribed to Eusebius of Caesarea, early fourth century, addressed to the sister 
of Constantine, refusing a request for a picture of Christ as unlawful, and say- 
ing that he had taken away from a lady friend pictures of Paul and Christ which 
she possessed. Encycl. Brit., art. " Image-worship." 3 Con/., iv. 13. 



*34 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



they existed or not. His former interest, however, sufficed 
to furnish him with a formal doctrine of beauty, which is indi- 
cated by the above-mentioned title, and does not in general 
go beyond the conception of symmetrical relations between 
parts as belonging to a whole. What is peculiar to him and 
constitutes an advance that merits more attention than it re- 
ceives, is the application of this view, specially supported by 
the analogy of fine art, to the universe as a whole considered 
as containing evil or ugliness (deformitas). By reason of 
this application, due of course to a theological motive, his 
view receives a deeper content than the easygoing provi- 
dential creed of Cicero, which in general expression it very 
greatly resembles. 

The variety correlative to unity in ancient formal aesthetic 
is deepened by Augustine into the opposition of contraries. 
This he considers to be essentially included within the sym- 
metry of the universe, as in a beautiful song, 1 or in the anti- 
theses of rhetoric, or in the shadows of a picture, which do 
not make it ugly if rightly placed. Poisons, dangerous 
animals, and the like, all have their due place in the world, 
and so far are elements in its beauty. We have here nothing 
to do with the question whether this bold treatment of sin 
and suffering can be justified theologically ; but its aesthetic 
bearing, which in Augustine's hands is very decidedly empha- 
sised, brings us at once up to the level of modern popular 
theory with reference to ugliness, such as we find implied in 
poetical or orthodox sentiment to-day. The essence of this 
theory is to recognise the ugly as a subordinate element in 
the beautiful, to which it serves as a foil, 2 contributing how- 
ever on the whole to an effect which is harmonious or sym- 
metrical quite or almost in the traditional sense. And it has the 
merit of attacking the problem of ugliness more directly than 



1 De. Civ. Dei) xi. 18, 23; xxii. 19. I quote the title of xi. 18. "De 
pulchritudine universitatis, quae per ordinationem Dei etiam ex contrariorum 
fit oppositione luculentior." I do not know of what kind the " antitheta " in 
a song would be ; I suspect it of simply meaning the responses as sung by 
the two sides of the choir under Ambrose at Milan. In that case, the com- 
parison from music has not the modernism of a reference to discord. Augus- 
tine's modernism in one doctrine, that of the certainty implied in doubt, "Si 
dubitat, cogitat," etc., has been mentioned above, p. 78. 

2 " Why rushed the discord in, but that harmony should be prized." — 
Browning's " Abt Vogler." 



COLOUR AND SYMMETRY. 



*35 



any Greek could attempt, more directly than Plutarch, who 
excluded the ugly from art except as an evidence of artistic 
skill, and than Plotinus, unless we interpret his view of the 
formless so as to give it a positive and not merely a negative 
bearing. It belongs to an intermediate stage between the 
abstract and the concrete perception of beauty. Symmetry, 
it admits, may be enriched by contrast, but symmetry and 
not characteristic expressiveness is still the ruling principle. 
It is a note of this popular view to insist on the small quanti- 
tative proportion in which it alleges the ugly to exist relatively 
to the beautiful, and this popular note we find in Augustine 
as in modern sentiment. But this is not really a consideration 
of any speculative importance, and tends to confuse the sub- 
ordination of ugliness to beauty as a factor, with the over- 
powering of our sense of ugliness by the greater mass of the 
beautiful — which, if that were all, would be a mere inaccuracy 
in our perceptions. 

There is historical interest in the stress laid by Augustine 
on the element of colour as a part of beauty in addition to 
symmetry. We saw that when Socrates conversed about 
beauty with Parrhasius, the painter was familiar with colour 
and symmetry as features in the beautiful, although Socrates' 
account of expression was new to him. 1 The same two terms 
are adduced by Plotinus in the forefront of his discussion as 
representing the aesthetic tradition which he censures as in- 
adequate ; but the strange thing is, that in spite of this, they 
descended as an adequate account of the beautiful to Thomas 
Aquinas through the pseudo-Dionysius, 2 who has very much 
in common with Plotinus. Here, too, in Augustine, about 
the contemporary of the pseudo-Dionysius, we find them 
occupying the same unquestioned place, 3 as though the con- 
spicuous reference of Plotinus to these terms had had more 
permanent effect than his criticism of them. I transcribe a 
passage from Augustine which illustrates this point, and also 
has an interest from containing a thought which reappears 
in Dante's Paradiso? " The beauty of any material object is 



1 Xen., Memor., 3, 10. 

2 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologice, secunda pars secundae partis Sect 
145, which quotes Dionysius by name. 

6 De. Civ. Dei, xi. 22, "moles" mass, in contrast to symmetry, and 
Augustine's view that size is indifferent in beauty, also remind us of Plotinus. 
4 De. Civ. Dei, xxii. 19. 



136 



HISTORY OF AESTHETIC. 



congruence of parts together with a certain sweetness 1 of 
colour. . . . But how great will be the sweetness of 
colour when the righteous shall shine forth like the sun in the 
kingdom of their Father." 

suppression of iv. Augustine, as we saw just now, allowed to 
increasing aul perish as trivial his early writings on the Beau- 
terity. tifal and the Fit, which we should have valued so 
highly. Yet his whole view of the universe had a strongly 
aesthetic tinge, and we must be careful how we interpret as a 
datum of the history of aesthetic, the violent suppression of 
Paganism which took place in his lifetime by the edicts of 
Theodosius, " with the loud and unanimous applause of the 
Christian world." 2 The widespread destruction of temples 
with their decorations, and their abandonment to decay, tells 
of religious hostility combined with brutal indifference to art ; 
but we must remember that the Parthenon, though disfigured 
in the fifth century by its conversion into a church, was hope- 
lessly ruined only by a siege twelve hundred years later ; and 
the Pantheon, having been preserved at first, we must sup- 
pose, by peculiar favour of the authorities, owed its subse- 
quent immunity to consecration in the sixth century. 3 There 
is a certain pathos attaching to the fact that the roll of Olympic 
victors closes in 393 a.d. with the name of an Armenian, after 
a reputed continuance of more than eleven centuries, while 
the Pheidian statue of Zeus was carried off to Constantinople 
— a step which shows some sense of its value on the part of 
the Christians, though we lament that it perished by fire in 
476 A.D. 

The suppression of Paganism, then, was in the first place 
not universally carried out with equal rigour ; and in the 
second place, though indicating the deepest ignorance, and 
indifference to the value of art, did not mainly arise from the 
same fanatical repugnance to artistic representation which 
subsequently revealed itself in the iconoclastic controversy. 
There was indeed in the fourth century already a rising tide of 
opposition even to Christian art, but, for the time, the censures 
recorded only serve to measure the still increasing employ- 

1 " Suavitas." In the clause following those which I quote " suavitas " is 
replaced by " claritas," the term used 800 years later by Thomas Aquinas. 

2 Gibbon's Decline and Fall, ch. xxviii. See Gibbon's and Milman's notes 
on the attitude of St. Augustine, from whom conflicting passages are quoted. 

3 Gibbon, I.e. 



GREGORY ON THE USE OF ART. 



137 



ment of painting and mosaic on the walls of churches. And 
it is plain that the austerity of the later peace of the church 1 
was now beginning to assert itself positively within the sphere 
of art as well as negatively against it ; for stories of martyr- 
doms were painted on the walls of basilicas, 2 and somewhat 
later even the passion and death of Christ were depicted, 3 
contrary to earlier custom. 

Along with this change in subjects there grew up, it would 
seem, the Byzantine manner of representation, gloomy and 
rigid in itself, but powerful by forcing a new element upon 
art, which was one day to be assimilated as a new element in 
beauty. 

significance of v. But the same restless dualism — restless be- 
iconociasm. cause m principle a monism — which in the vis- 
ible world preferred nature to art, and in art itself preferred 
the absence of what had hitherto been felt as beauty — 
in both these aspects repeating the thought of Plato — was 
destined to go still further in Plato's track, and turn its distrust 
of the visible both against the whole of pictorial art, and 
against the whole beauty of the visible world. In the time 
of Gregory the Great (sixth century), the bishop of Marseilles 4 
ordered the removal and destruction of all sacred images 
within his diocese, in consequence of which violent action 
Gregory laid down the distinction that it is one thing to worship 
a picture, and another to learn from the language of a picture 
what that is which ought to be worshipped. What those who 
can read learn by means of writing, the uneducated learn by 
means of looking at a picture — that, therefore, ought not to 
have been destroyed which had been placed in the churches, 
not for worship, but solely for instructing the minds of the 
ignorant. The same moderate line which Gregory adopted 
was afterwards taken by Charlemagne, and became the rule 
of the Western Church, which however, we are told, was by 
no means free from iconoclastic opinion. The didactic value 
and mission of art has partly been discussed in connection 
with Plato and Aristotle, and though in strict form it falls out- 



1 See p. 127 above. 

2 Arts. "Image-worship," and " Mural Decoration," Encycl. Brit. Paulinus 
of Nola (d. 431 a.d.) had subjects from Christian history painted as a means 
of instruction. 

3 As in the church of San Clemente,at Rome. 

4 Art. " Image-worship," Encycl. Brit. 



133 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



side aesthetic, yet in substance it affects important issues 
regarding the comparative position of art in literary and in 
illiterate ages, and if only for this reason will have to be dealt 
with below. 

The actual iconoclastic controversy arose and ran its course 
within the Eastern Church, covering, with intervals, a period 
of about 1 20 years, from 726 to after 842, and it is worth 
while to note from an aesthetic point of view, the probability 
that the emperor Leo the Isaurian, whose edict against images 
began it, had been influenced by intercourse with Jews and 
Arabs. 1 The high-water mark of the agitation was the 
Council of Constantinople in 754, attended by 338 bishops, 
but never recognised as oecumenical, which determined that 
" Christ in His glorified humanity, though not incorporeal, was 
yet exalted above all the limits and defects of a sensuous 
nature, too exalted therefore to be figured by human art in an 
earthly material after the analogy of any other human body," 
and pronounced anathema on all who attempted to express by 
visible colours the form of the Logos in His incarnation, and 
on all who delineate dumb and lifeless figures of the saints, 
which could never serve any profitable end. 2 And although 
the Eastern Church after 842 returned to a theoretical position 
much like that of Gregory and Charlemagne, yet the Byzan- 
tine manner of painting maintained itself in Italy till the 
twelfth century, and survives in Athos till the present day, 
under the influence, it would seem, of a distinctly ascetic 
theory and code of rules. 3 

In this dispute we see yet another phase of the shifting 
dualism between the spirit and the flesh. Reinforced by the 
extra-mundane monotheism of Jews and Mahometans, the 
faith in a spiritual order now turns decisively, as in Plato, 
against all sensuous presentations as essentially inadequate to 
that order ; and attains the result of recording a protest, like 
that of Plato, that in so far as to represent means to copy 
something that can be copied, so far the spiritual, as such, 



1 Gibbon, ch. 49. 

2 Art. " Image-worship," Encycl. Brit. 

3 Cf. the alleged remark of a Greek monk on some pictures of Titian, which 
he had ordered and refused to accept : "Your scandalous pictures stand 
quite out from the canvas ; they are as bad as statues." — Gibbon, ch. 49 note. 
" Images," it seems, down to the ninth century, mean pictures and mosaics. 
Sculptures are only mentioned in the ninth century and later. 



PRACTICAL TRUTH OF THE DECISION. 



139 



cannot be represented in a sensuous form. The difference is 
that now the conception of symbolism is in the air, and the 
whole problem is therefore on the level to which Plato raised 
it, and not on that from which he started. The "other" or 
spiritual world of which he was concerned to demonstrate the 
reality, is now (however crudely apprehended) the one object 
of faith to the popular mind ; and the deceitfulness of sensuous 
forms is no longer the conclusion of the solitary thinker, but 
the premiss fanatically urged by a section of the common 
crowd. Therefore the weight of the problem is thrown in a 
new direction ; not towards exalting the value of the "other" 
world, but towards re-establishing or maintaining its cohesion 
with this. And though Gregory the Great was indifferent to 
learning, and Charlemagne could hardly write, yet the logic 
of facts and the experience of ages drove them into a solution 
which Plato, just because he helped to make it possible, only 
recognised when at his very best. For the position of these 
authorities, who could not be expected to talk the language of 
philosophy, and who were conditioned in their policy by all 
sorts of passions and necessities affecting the Church of their 
respective times— which after all were necessities of human 
life — may fairly be paraphrased thus : " We know that 
pictures cannot be copies of an essence which is inaccessible 
to sensuous perception, and therefore they are not to be 
worshipped ; 1 but they can teach, because visible things can 
have a meaning ; and therefore pictures are not to be rejected, 
but are to be retained as means of instruction and as aids to 
memory." In aesthetic philosophy such a view is incorrect, or 
incorrectly formulated. But the effect of art is not limited by 
the grounds which the powers that be allege for permitting it 
to exist, and in the widest historical sense, though not in the 
strict language of philosophy, there is no doubt whatever that 
art is the instructress of peoples. 
The system of vi. It was in the ninth century, just about the 
scotus Erigena. t j me at wn j c h the controversy regarding pictorial 
art in sacred buildings was decided both in the East and the 
West, that a really considerable thinker formulated mediaeval, 
ideas in a complete system, and, as a part of it, laid down the 
place and nature of material beauty. The position of this 



1 " Es hilft nichts, unsere Knie beugen wir doch nicht mehr." Hegel, Aesth. i. 
132, describing the inevitable modern distinction between art and religion. 



140 



HISTORY OF AESTHETIC 



philosopher, Scotus Erigena, from whom I have already 1 quoted 
a typical statement of mediaeval symbolism, is one of the cir- 
cumstances that make it hard to know precisely where we are 
to look for the Dark Ages. We are apt to think of them as 
a prolonged period, ending with the Renaissance, in which 
disputants, ignorant alike of science and of real philosophy, 
wrangled about logical forms that were in truth subordinate 
to theological doctrines. But we saw above that our concep- 
tion of the Renaissance is leading us to trace it ever further 
back ; and on the other hand the modern estimate of Erieena 
tends to throw the origin of Scholasticism proper somewhat 
later than his lifetime. Scholasticism proper, then, is in fact 
the beginning of the end, and coincides with the two or three 
centuries of definite intellectual advance that preceded the life 
of Dante, assuming that we refuse to attach importance to it 
after his day. But if Scholasticism — r the conscious adjustment 
of relations between philosophy and theology — marked the 
close of the Dark Ages, the speculation of Erigena, continuous 
with that of Greek as well as Latin writers, apparently was 
before their beginning, in which case the long tract of obscurity, 
that represents them to the popular imagination, had really no 
existence, and the attributes of the middle age must be stated 
with greater care and sympathy. 

To begin with, Erigena was a Greek scholar ; the last, I 
suppose, in the West before the time of Roger Bacon (twelfth 
century). He writes much in the sense of St. Augustine, but 
he also translated from the Greek the writings of the pseudo- 
Dionysius, and uses long quotations, rendered into Latin from 
Maximus (seventh century). Dionysius, thus Latinised, af- 
fected the opinions of Aquinas ; and so the ideas of Plotinus, 
with which Dionysius was saturated, form a continuous strand 
throughout the thought of the greatest mediaeval teachers. 

And again, Erigena was a philosopher ; true philosophy 
and true theology were for him coincident, not in the sense of 
subordinating either to the other, but in the sense that truth 
agrees with truth. His general views do not strictly concern 
us here ; but to show that a writer in the age of faith, whose 
use of fact and of analogy is absolutely childish, may yet be 
very rational in his leading thoughts upon central questions, 
it is worth while to mention that he maintained the Eucharist 



Page 131 above. 



TRUE AND FALSE BEAUTY. 



I 4 I 



to be merely a symbolical and commemorative rite ; treated the 
Mosaic account of the creation as purely allegorical, and as- 
cribed to hell no local existence, but regarded it as an inner 
state of the will. 1 

This is not the opportunity, and I have not the ability, to 
treat the vast problem involved in the mixture of reason and 
folly presented to us by the age of faith ; but I may be 
allowed to point out that in the division of labour, which the 
course of history enforces, it fell upon the middle age to make 
the first sketch-plan of a new life, and teach its use to illite- 
rate peoples ; and it is natural that attention could not be 
given to accuracy of details till after the main bearings 
had been roughly set down. Neither the philosophy of the 
great Greek classics nor the wide survey of methodic natural 
science would have met fairly and squarely the problems 
which pressed upon Augustine, Erigena, or Dante ; and 
therefore it seems as if all had happened in its due order, and- 
as if the instruments which did accomplish the task were the 
only ones which could have done so. 

In aesthetic, Erigena does not seem to make any definite 
advance of detail upon Augustine, and even falls back in com- 
parison with him by a less vivid appreciation of the problem 
of ugliness. His strength, as is natural for a systematic philo- 
sopher, is rather in discriminating the relations which re- 
spectively constitute the true and false beauty of the visible 
world, as depending upon the position which the human mind 
may assign it with reference to the invisible world. He 
discusses this question in connection with the story of the 
Fall, following Maximus in his interpretation of the " tree of 
knowledge of good and evil." This, the exposition says, 2 
stands for the nature of visible things, which, if apprehended 
in their "reasons" 3 or significance gives the knowledge of 
good, if taken as the object of desire gives the knowledge of 
evil that brings death. The "woman" stands for sense, the 
" man " for reason. God 4 made the visible creation in order 
that through it, as through the invisible, His praise might be 
multiplied, and He might be known, — not. what He is, but that 
He is the single author of all creation both visible and in- 

1 Prof. Adamson, art. " Erigena," in E?icycl. Brit. 

2 Erigena, Works, Floss' ed., p. 842. 

3 Rationes, cf. Plotinus' Aoyoi. 

4 IK 843 B. 



142 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



visible. And therefore [in the story of the Fall] God forbade 
human nature to take delight in the visible creation before it 
(human nature) arrived at the perfection of wisdom in which 
being made one with God (deificata), it might be able to con- 
verse with God about the significance of visible things. Nor 
would the woman, that is the fleshly perception, be able to attract 
the man, that is the intellect, 1 to take delight in the material 
creation externally considered {i.e. not in its significance), if 
he purposed to have the knowledge of the Creator before the 
knowledge of the created. Therefore it was the order laid 
down by the divine law, first to learn of the Creator and His 
unspeakable beauty, and then to regard the creation in a 
significant or spiritual sense, conforming to the inclinations 
of the intelligence, and to interpret the whole of its beauty, 
whether it exist inwardly in significance or outwardly in 
sensible forms, as showing forth the praise of the Creator. 
" It 2 is not therefore the creation that is bad, nor the know- 
ledge of it, but the perverse impulse of the reasonable mind, 
which abandons the contemplation of its author and turns with 
lustful and illicit appetite to the love of sensible matter." 
And following Gregory 3 of Nyssa, he identifies the ugly with 
matter that has no form or the wrong form ; that is, once 
more, that is not apprehended or desired in its true relation 
to the will of God. From the point of view of the universe, 
I imagine, there is according to Erigena's conception no real 
ugliness. 

We find in him no special philosophy of fine art ; the dis- 
tinction between the theoretical and the non-theoretical senses 
is indeed touched upon, 4 but is rather minimised than accented ; 
and the general doctrine of beauty is exceedingly defective on 
the side of the distinction between beauty and knowledge. 

Nevertheless we have here a two-edged idea of great im- 
portance in the history of the aesthetic consciousness. In 
the first place, Erigena crowns the ascetic movement which 
had shown itself in iconoclastic opinion, by a sweeping con- 
demnation of the whole charm of the visible world, including 
both art and nature, except on a certain definite condition. 
Thus on the one side the antagonism of sense and spirit 
finds a thoroughgoing representative in him. 

But in the second place, the condition which he lays down, 



Animum. 



2 lb., 844 D. 3 lb., 789-90. 4 lb., 854. 



BEAUTY AS MEANING. 



143 



as essential to real beauty, that the visible creation shall be 
apprehended as a revelation of the glory of God, and therefore 
apart from the relation of sensuous desire, appears to me to 
have more than a rhetorical value. It implies no doubt a 
disinterested sense of the real teleology in man and nature, 
and therefore approximates technically to Kant's definition, 
" teleology without an end." And moreover it applies this 
sense of rationality to the whole world through and through, not 
merely to art nor to the choicer parts of nature ; thus mani- 
festing that conviction of universal significance which lies at 
the root both of modern science and of modern art. If we 
look back to Plato and Aristotle, we shall see that the mediae- 
val " pulchritudo," taken as something co-extensive with the 
visible universe considered as the work of God which He 
has pronounced to be good, has become a far more familiar 
working conception and factor in opinion than was their ko\ov 
in this particular application to the beauty of material things. 
And the transition from imitation to symbolism immensely 
facilitated this generalisation. Imitation is only a rule of 
art, and prima facie can make nothing beautiful which is not 
given as beautiful. Symbolism is a mode of interpretation ; 
and with all its enormous risks of arbitrariness, has the one 
advantage of absolute universality. If all that has a meaning 
may be beautiful, then there is nothing in which we may not 
chance to detect an element of beauty. It is easy to see how 
hopeful is such an idea, and how rich a prospect it opens, in 
comparison with the notion of the beautiful as finally and 
unalterably given to perception. 

Anticipation of viL The antagonism between -this" world and 
End of world the "other" takes its sharpest form for Christians 

inl000A.D. . . . . r , r , . , . . 

in anticipations 01 the second coming ; and it is 
said 1 that in the tenth century these assumed so definite a 
reference to the year 1000 a.d. (iooo years from the Incarna- 
tion) as to give a decided check to the erection of great build- 
ings. Such a revival of the belief in the short-livedness of 
the whole visible frame of things forms an appropriate climax 
to the movement which began with a distrust of formative 
art, and ended with a condemnation, conditional in theory, 
but probably unconditional in practice, of material beauty as 
a whole. 



1 EncycL Brit., arts. "Architecture." "Millennium." "Illumination." 



i 4 4 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



After the year iooo, whether owing to relief from the ex- 
pectation of the end, or to the incipient organisation and 
national life of Europe, the practice of building was resumed 
with greater zeal than ever, and, as if a crisis had been passed, 
even the art of sculpture — though especially hateful to the 
ascetic spirit — began to make headway in conjunction with 
architecture. 

It does not seem, however, that either beauty in general 
or fine art in particular received theoretical consideration from 
the earlier scholastics. We find in Abelard's hymns 1 the 
familiar sentiment that nature is above art, and he sums up 
the discussion, whether the heathen poets should be read by 
Christians, unfavourably to the poets, 2 relying in part on the 
example of Plato. His life, and the vernacular love-songs 
he wrote, must have had an influence greatly opposed to his 
teaching, which was probably determined by a revulsion of 
feeling almost analogous to that of St. Augustine on his con- 
version. 

The viii. St. Francis of Assisi (i 182-1226) must be 

Modem Mind mentioned here, not only as the earliest Italian 

in St. Francis. • • r i • i 11 a 

poet, in virtue 01 the Cantico delle Creature, but 
on account of the peculiar qualities exhibited in his life and 
character. No more striking representation of the modern 
mind in contrast with the antique, no more felicitous union of 
the complementary and contrasted attributes which imply each 
other in the logic of evolution, could be invented by the his- 



1 Abelard lived 1079-1142. For the hymns see Cousin's edition of the 
Works, 1. 300. Some verses from a hymn on the Creation are worth quoting. 
The 'beginning of rhyme is noteworthy, and so is the mixture of Horatian 
and Christian sentiment. 

Impensis, dives, nimiis 
Domum casuram construis ; 
Falso sole pingis testudinem 
Falsis stellis in coeli speciem. 

In veri coeli camera 
Pauper jacit pulcherrima ; 
Vero sole, veris sideribus 
Istam illi depinxit Dominus. 

Opus magis eximium 

Est naturae quam hominum ; 

Quod nec labor nec sumptus praeparat 

Nec vetustas solvendo dissipat. 

2 Works, 2. 442. 



CHARACTER OF ST. FRANCIS. 



H5 



torian of philosophy to illustrate his argument. We said, in 
entering upon the post-classical time of decadence, that the 
modern mind in comparison with the ancient is a divided 
mind. It is not distinguished by inclusion within one side 
of an antithesis as against the other, but by presenting both 
sides of the antithesis, whether reconciled or not, in a form 
which is at first sight that of the most trenchant antagonism. 

First, then, we observe in St. Francis the very height of 
mystical asceticism, that is, technically speaking, the approach 
to God by irrational contemplation in withdrawal from the 
actual world. The story of the stigmata clearly points to 
habitual self-concentration of this kind. 

But, secondly, there is ascribed to him by common consent 
an extraordinary sympathy with nature, both animate and 
inanimate. The address to "Brother Sun" is, strictly and 
logically Christian in spirit. The self-concentrated modern 
mind turns hungrily to nature, as aesthetic theory has. pointed 
out in various formulas, just because it finds in, itself so deep 
a need. 

And thirdly, in the mind of this mystical ascetic and sympa- 
thetic lover of nature there was an innate capacity for one 
great form of reasonable work — for organisation, and the 
management of men. It is needless to enlarge on this char- 
acteristic in the founder of the Franciscan order. 

Even in so great a character as that of St. Francis these 
varied tendencies impress us with a sense of mystery and 
contradiction. They do not display themselves in the same 
action, and have an external appearance of being rather vicis- 
situdes of life than revelations of a single purpose. They are 
much less easily explicable than the attributes of the poet 
who is a citizen poet, or the hero who is a citizen hero, or the 
philosopher who is a citizen philosopher. And in the lesser 
moderns they do in fact to some degree fall apart, as they did 
in the sects and men of the decadence, — the Stoic, the Epi- 
curean, the Neo-Platonist, the amatory or pastoral poet. But 
yet they have an underlying connection, and in all their rich 
and apparently lawless profusion are essential attributes of 
the modern mind. Thus, for example, the self-concentration 
of St. Francis in his devotional raptures 1 cannot have indi- 
cated a mind abstracted or detached from organic reason and 

1 It will be remembered that Socrates is said to have been subject to 
trances of some kind. 

L 



146 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



reality, but only an element of abstraction and detachment 
which is the outward aspect of possession by profound and 
complex ideas. Especially this is the case, when, in the in- 
tervals of action, ideas fall into shapes of feeling prescribed 
by tradition. The depth of the intelligence is correlative and 
not antagonistic to its breadth, and the reason which grapples 
most energetically and sympathetically with things outside, 
both needs, and for that very reason possesses, the profound- 
est self-concentration within. The meditations of the mere 
recluse are generally shallow meditations. 
The Esthetic * x * ^ ot muc h l ess active and brilliant in his 
ideas of st. day, though less known to posterity by other than 

Thomas Aquinas.-, • J R . K r ^ ^ 

literary achievements, was the greatest 01 bchool- 
men, the Dominican Thomas of Aquino. Born in 1227, the 
year after the death of St. Francis, he lived on the public 
stage as an ardent controversialist in the interest of his order 
and of liberty of teaching, as a lecturer in Paris, Rome, and 
Bologna, and as the adviser of king and pope on questions of 
ecclesiastical management ; and closed his amazingly laborious 
career at the age of forty-seven, as St. Francis at the age of forty- 
four. I insist upon these biographical details because it appears 
to me that only by realising the energy of such brief and 
versatile lives are we enabled, as also in the history of Abelard, 
to place our finger on the quickening pulse of the time. It 
might be worth while even to raise the question whether the 
weakness of mediaeval science and philosophy was not con- 
nected rather with excess of practice than with excess of 
theory.^ What we justly stigmatise as the subordination of 
philosophy to theology is, in other words, a subordination of 
science to a formulated conception of human welfare; with a 
strictly mundane if also with a transcendental side. The 
question is not unimportant, for it indicates that the essence 
of scholasticism is present, not wherever there is metaphysic, 
but wherever the spirit of truth is subordinated to any pre- 
conceived practical intent, whether mundane or extra-mun- 
dane. Some such considerations as these force themselves 
upon us, however much we allow for the dissociation of men's 
practice from their opinions, when we contrast the busy 
public lives of Abelard in his greatness, or of Anselm, of 
St. Francis or St. Thomas, with the cloistered industry of 
Newton or Locke or Spinoza. 1 

1 I do not think that a comparison even with Descartes and Leibnitz, how- 



COLOUR AND SYMMETRY AGAIN. 



147 



The Summa Theologica, which was to bring to a focus, as 
we should say, the bearings of all knowledge upon man's 
highest interests, was the antitype in science of St. Thomas', 
ideas of political and ecclesiastical unity. In this Summa the 
nature of beauty is more than once referred to. 1 The follow- 
ing points may be noted in accordance with the scheme 
previously adopted. 

1. The substantive account of beauty is drawn 

symbolism. ^^^^ ^ p Seuc [o-Dionysius (translated, it will 
be remembered, by Scotus Erigena) from the tradition which 
was already a tradition in the time of Plotinus, and was criti- 
cised by him as inadequate. The precise correspondence of 
terms between St. Thomas, in a passage 2 where he cites 
chapter and verse from Dionysius for his view, and Augustine, 
Plotinus, and Xenophon 3 — the terms are " Claritas et de- 
bita proportio " (brightness of colour and symmetry) = -^pcojui.a k. 
cviuLiuLeTpla — leaves no reasonable doubt that this is so. In 
another place 4 " Integritas sive perfectio " is added as a third 
element of beauty to " Debita proportio sive consonantia" and 
" Claritas — i.e., color nitidus." But this addition makes no 
difference of principle, only insisting from the side of the 
whole on the same condition which "debita proportio" im- 
poses upon all the parts. As in Plotinus, the ultimate ground 
of attraction in beauty is the affinity, revealed in symmetry, 
between the percipient and the perceived. Although St. 
Thomas makes the senses the direct bearers of this affinity — ■ 
" The senses are charmed with things duly proportioned, as 
analogous to themselves ('Sicut in sibi similibus ' 5 ) " — yet 
he clearly adopts the derivation of all beauty from God, 6 and 
gives, like Plotinus, the first rank to the sense of sight 7 be- 
cause of its affinity to the intellect. 

ever prominent in the world these great men were, really invalidates this 
suggestion. Leibnitz was led by his practical interests to write a Syste??ia 
Theologicum in the interest of Catholic-Protestant reunion. Even Francis 
Bacon has the scholastic attribute that his logic is moulded rather by a final 
cause in a human need than by real conditions in the nature of the subject 
matter. 

1 See Preface. 

2 Summa Theol., 2 pars 2 partis, q. 145,. art. 2. 

3 See pp. 45, 117 supra. 

4 Summa, 1 pars, q. 39, art. 8. 

5 lb., 1 pars, q. 5, art. 4. 

6 I.e. note 2 above. 

7 Summa contra gentes, bk. 3, ch. 53. 



148 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



Thus we may conclude that symmetry is beautiful, for 
him as for his predecessors, because symbolic of reason and 
divinity ; but he does not, any more than they, follow Ploti- 
nus in the demand for life and expression as something more 
than symmetry. 

Esthetic 2 - St. Thomas lays it down that in beauty 
interest, desire is quiet, or is quieted. The meaning of 
this, which is per se ambiguous, for desire may be quieted by 
being satiated, seems to be made plain by the inference drawn 
from it, that the beautiful is the concern of the specially 
"cognitive" senses of sight and hearing ; l and more generally, 
that beauty has to do with the cognitive power. 2 I think 
that this does not indicate a confusion between beauty and 
knowledge, but only a distinction between perception and 
appetite. 

concrete 3- The distinction between the aesthetic and 

criticism, unaesthetic senses — "we do not speak of beautiful 
tastes or smells," — is taken on the ground that sight and hear- 
ing are more the instruments of reason and more perceptive 
in their character than taste or smell. This seems to mean, 
first, that the semblance is in them more separable from the 
reality which arouses desire ; and, secondly, that they are 
capable of apprehending a structural whole. That there is 
no confusion between beauty and knowledge is shown by 
the clear contrast laid down between material and spiritual 
beauty, the latter being explained as something named by 
analogy from the characteristics of sensible beauty. 

The primacy assigned to sight as nearer to intellect rests 
no doubt on the same general grounds which have been 
analysed above. 3 In estimating it we must bear in mind 
that the great romantic art of music, as we know it, had not 
then arisen, while we all the more respect the prophetic in- 
sight of Plato and Aristotle, who in great measure understood 
the extraordinary power of sound. 

Thus it appears that the Neo-Platonic tradition was the 
principal element in the intellectual aesthetic of the middle 
age. Though a part of Plotinus' concrete application was 
lost, yet the general scheme of his view was in conformity 
with the Christian consciousness, which, partly by inheritance 
and partly by origination, made an analogous conviction its 



1 1 pars 2 partis, q. 27, art. 1. 2 1 pars, q. 5, art. 4. 3 p. 117. 



THE BEAUTY OF THE UNIVERSE. 



149 



own peculiar attribute. That beauty is the revelation of 
reason in sensuous shape, that its fascination consists in its 
affinity with mind, and that consequently the entire sensible 
universe, as a symbol of the Divine reason, must be beautiful 
to the eye that can see it in relation to its Creator, all this 
had sunk deep into Christian sentiment, and is familiar to us 
both in profound and in shallow readings of the argument 
from design. Unquestionably, the middle age, throughout 
its long development, was inspired by this conviction, uncon- 
scious in its art which was an achievement, but conscious in 
its theory which was a postulate. 

Only there remained, and remains, a certain half-hearted- 
ness in theoretical dealing with the phenomena of apparent 
unreason, for aesthetic as for theology. From the place of 
the grotesque and the ascetic, the mysterious and the sublime, 
in Gothic architecture and Byzantine painting, we should infer 
the boldest and most concrete practical monism, or acceptance 
of all that is as at least a part of beauty. But, on the other 
hand, from the total absence, so far as we have seen, of 
theoretical study directed to the concrete analysis of austere 
or recondite beauty in nature or in art, we should infer that 
for mediaeval theory the beauty of the universe was rather an 
abstraction, to be justified in detail by a later age, than an 
indication of genuine sympathy with the romantic con- 
sciousness. 

For all that, however, the conception of universal beauty 
was there in name at least, and by St. Augustine was felt to 
be capable of including real or apparent contradiction in some 
degree. 

Thus, by the side of a comprehensive and concrete artistic 
practice there had come down and been accepted a theory 
more comprehensive still, as including external nature, but 
bare of detailed application ; and when the aesthetic con- 
sciousness of the middle age had passed, not indeed from 
death to a second birth, but from birth and infancy to 
maturity and articulate utterance, then aesthetic theory was 
absorbed into artistic practice, which filled it at last with 
adequate content, destined one day to become in turn the 
material of more fruitful theory. 

Dante was born in the lifetime of St. Thomas, and speaks 
with his voice, both in the formal theory of beauty, and in 
the meaning which he ascribes to the universe. Whether he 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



would himself have said that his great poem was beautiful 
according to his own definition of beauty can hardly be 
judged ; but if not, it would none the less be true that he 
was actively inspired by that conception of universal beauty 
which for the mere thinker had probably been little more 
than a phrase or a dream. This wide conception, explicit in 
mediaeval faith, as implicit in mediaeval workmanship, was 
represented in the higher imaginative forms by Dante and 
his fellow artists, and in being realized was carried far beyond 
all previous intellectual ideas of beauty, and very probably 
beyond theoretical recognition on the part of those who 
realized it. 



CHAPTER VII. 



A COMPARISON OF DANTE AND SHAKESPEARE IN RESPECT 
OF SOME FORMAL CHARACTERISTICS. 

Limits of the The very strict limitations under which the pre- 
subjects. sent chapter must be written may seem likely to 
annihilate its interest, but will really, I hope, preserve it from 
intolerable tediousness ; for any writer would be tedious, I 
imagine, who, not being qualified by a life-long study of fine 
art, and being guided only by ordinary cultivated opinion, 
should wander over the immense field of the Renaissance in 
search of an aesthetic moral 

I propose, therefore, in the first place, to confine my con- 
sideration, except in mere passing remarks, to the two great 
poets who appear respectively to open and to close the age of 
the new birth, when we consider it not as a fresh departure in 
letters and science, but as the flowering time of a beauty that 
had long been in the making. It will be possible to point out 
in these two typical cases some important features of the great 
movement in its course and issue. 

And in the second place it would, I should suppose, be un- 
endurable that any ordinary writer should throw out, so to 
speak, in passing, his general appreciations of these two suns 
of literature, upon whose splendours the greatest critics and 
philosophers of the modern world have expended their most 
industrious study. But under the strict limitations which I 
propose to adopt there is something definite to be said which 
is not wholly without value. I may illustrate my meaning by 
reference to the exploded idea that great artists are guided in 
production by aesthetic recipes or prescriptions. If it were so, 
what could be of greater historical interest than to disentangle 
from their works and to compare with one another the abstract 
schemes according to which these works were created ? And 
although no such formulae exist, yet undoubtedly there is in 
every work of art an element of distinct intention, subject 
moreover, like all our conscious purposes, to limits perfectly 
obvious to an onlooker though hidden from the author him- 

151 



152 HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



self, with regard to the species of art to which it is to belong, 
the sort of subject about which it is to treat, and the sort of point 
or significance which it is to possess. Such an element of formal 
purpose is especially inevitable in the case of modern artists 
who live in an atmosphere of reflection, and among them more 
particularly in the case of poets, whose imagination is forced 
to be conversant with explicit language and articulate ideas. 
It is to this element of formal intention, with its most obvious 
limits as regards subject and treatment, that I intend to re- 
strict myself in comparing Dante and Shakespeare. In itself, 
it is in each case a fact no less positive than that Turner 
painted landscapes, and Reynolds portraits, or that Goethe 
drew from Marlowe the connection of Helena with Faustus. 
It is therefore the legitimate prey of the historian, who is 
attempting to trace the extent and position of the spheres 
successively occupied by the beautiful in the intellectual sys- 
tem. For the sense and modesty of his interpretation he, of 
course, remains responsible. 

The selection of Fi rst > then, there is a notable contrast in the 
Artistic Form selection of artistic form by Dante and by Shake- 
by the two Poets. S p eare< J sa y « [ n tne selection of artistic form " 

and not "in the artistic form selected." For it might be replied, 
" Shakespeare was a dramatist, and Dante was not ; what 
then " ? But this is not quite the point. The remarkable point 
is that Dante, though a worshipper of Vergil, and apparently 
well acquainted with Latin poetry in general, and charged, 
moreover, in every fibre of his being with respect for in- 
tellectual authority, nevertheless devised a totally new species 
of poetic art, coming under no possible category in the ac- 
cepted classification with which he was perfectly familiar. 1 
He himself called his great work a Comedy first because it 
begins grimly and ends pleasantly ; and secondly, because it 
is written in the vernacular, in which even women converse, 
and therefore must be regarded as, in a humble style, con- 
trasted with that of tragedy. 2 

But we need not say that it is not a comedy ; for it is not 
even a drama, having neither dramatic form nor dramatic 
unity. Nor can it seriously be taken as an epic, 2 for the in- 

1 Letter to Can Grande. Dante's Works, ed Fraticelli. 3. 508 ff. 

2 As Mr. O. Browning seems to class it, Encycl. Brit., art. " Dante." Cf. 
for the whole of this question Schelling's brilliant essay " Ueber Dante in 
Philosophischer Beziehung," Werke, 5, 153. 



INDIVIDUALITY IN THE TWO POETS. 



153 



cidents are not in any normal sense parts within a single 
action ; there is in fact no action, and thus once more, the poem 
cannot be called a romance. To compare it to a didactic 
poem would plainly be futile ; and although it contains lyrical 
elements, yet nothing so heavily burdened with plastic and 
historical content could conceivably be called a lyrical poem. 

And yet it is anything but formless. From the scheme 
of the versification to the order of the argument, all is sym- 
metrically planned ; and so symmetrically that we should 
certainly call it pedantic were not its definiteness simply an 
attribute of perhaps the most vivid imagination that ever ex- 
pressed itself in poetry. 

The Divine Comedy, then, is absolutely unique in form. 
By setting the traditional classification at defiance it raised, at 
the outset of modern art, the fundamental aesthetic problem 
whether art-species are permanent. All this significance is 
lost if we go about in a half-hearted way to effect an approxi- 
mation between it and an epic or a tragedy. And being 
unique, it is a very type of individuality. It is, says Frati- 
celli, " a political, historical, and ethical picture of the thirteenth 
century." 1 Although it is such a picture, it yet has its central 
interest in the fate of souls, and more particularly in that of 
the poet's soul. Nothing could be more universal, and nothing 
could be more individual, nothing even more personal. It is 
the climax of the long movement which we have attempted to 
trace, in which the individual spirit has deepened into a uni- 
verse within, because it has widened into oneness with the 
universe without. 

When we turn to Shakespeare, we find that in the form 
of art this unique and personal individuality is to some 
extent toned down. The comparatively slow development of 
English genius, together with the local remoteness which was 
in part its cause, had apparently enabled our great poet to 
take suggestions from the later or pseudo-classical Renaissance, 
without, however, being subdued by it into the formalism 
which elsewhere was rapidly setting in during his lifetime. 
He is aware of the classical tradition, and takes from it that 
which he needs. The sixteenth century in England had been 
full of critical dispute and poetical experiments. The "dramatic 
unities " of time and even of place were maintained by one 



1 Fraticelli's edition, Introduction. 



154 



HISTORY OF AESTHETIC. 



party with an absoluteness which we think unreasonable, and 
know to be un-Aristotelian. But for this there may have been 
a comparative justification if, as Sidney alleges, the common 
romantic dramas of his day were even more careless of the 
contradictions which they forced upon the audience than the 
play of Ferrex and Porrex (1561), in which incidents that 
would occupy several hours begin and end while a single 
speech is being delivered on the stage. 1 Sidney however 
evidently thought that not merely reason, but tradition and 
the custom of the ancients, followed, as he tells us, by the 
modern Italians, were decisive arguments on behalf of stricter 
form. 2 The " mungrell Tragy-comedie " vexes him greatly; 

1 See Sidney's Apologie for Poetrie, circ. 1580. Shuckburgh's ed. p. 51 ff. 
and notes. Ferrex and Porrex is the play known as Gorboduc^ in the style of 
Seneca. Sidney only refers to Aristotle as enjoining the restriction of time to 
one day, which is correct except for the absoluteness he lends to the "pre- 
cept." The unity of " place " he lays down, but does not ascribe to Aristotle. 

2 The whole passage is so picturesque, and so exactly illustrates the scene 
on which Shakespeare was just about to appear, that I venture to quote it in 
extenso. Shuckburgh's ed. pp. 51-54. 

"Our Tragedies, and Comedies (not without cause cried out against) observ- 
ing rules neyther of honest civilitie nor of skilfull Poetrie, excepting Gorbo- 
duck (againe, I say, of those that I have seene), which notwithstanding, as it 
is full of stately speeches and well-sounding Phrases, clyming to the height of 
Seneca his stile, and as full of notable moralitie, which it doth most delight- 
fully teach, and so obtayne the very end of Poesie ; yet in troth it is very 
defectious in the circumstances : which greeveth me, because it might not 
remaine as an exact model of all Tragedies. For it is faulty both in place 
and time, the two necessary companions of all corporall actions. For where 
the stage should alwaies represent but one place, and the uttermost time pre- 
supposed in it should be, both by Aristotle's precept and common reason, but 
one day : there is both many dayes, and many places, inartificially imagined. 
But if it be so in Gorboduck, how much more in al the rest? where you shal 
have Asia of the one side, and Affrick of the other, and so many other under- 
kingdoms; that the Player, when he commeth in, must ever begin with telling 
where he is ; or els, the tale wil not be conceived. Now ye shall have three 
Ladies walke to gather flowers, and then we must beleeve the stage to be a 
Garden. By and by, we heare newes of shipwracke in the same place, and 
then wee are to blame, if we accept it not for a Rock. Upon the backe of 
that, comes out a hidious Monster, with fire and smoke, and then the miser- 
able beholders are bounde to take it for a Cave. While in the mean-time, 
two Armies flye in, represented with foure swords and bucklers, and then 
what harde heart will not receive it for a pitched fielde ? 

" Now, of time they are much more liberall. For ordinary it is that two 
young Princes fall in love : after many traverces, she is got with childe, de- 
livered of a faire boy ; he is lost, groweth a man, falls in love, and is ready to 
get another child, and all this in two hours' space : which how absurd it is in 
sense, even sense may imagine, and Arte hath taught, and all auncient 



Shakespeare's form. 



155 



but we can hardly be sure whether his censure would have 
applied to Shakespeare's humour in tragedies, for Shakespeare 
himself objected in terms not unlike Sidney's, to the officious 
interference of the clowns in serious passages. Translations 
from Seneca and an adaptation of the Phoenissce of Euripides 
were succeeded on the stage by the wild imaginations of 
Marlowe ; and to Ben Jonson and Shakespeare the whole 
conflict of forms and tendencies was full of instruction and 
suggestion. 3 

Coming upon the arena thus prepared for him, Shakespeare 
adopts a distinctly traditional dramatic form. He accepts the 



examples justified : and at this day, the ordinary Players in Italie wil not erre 
in. Yet wil some bring in an example of Eunuchus in Terence, that con- 
taineth matter of two dayes, yet far short of twenty yeeres. True it is, and so 
was it to be played in two daies, and so fitted to the time it set forth. And 
though Plautus hath in one place done amisse, let us hit with him, and not 
misse with him. 

" But they wil say, how then shall we set forth a story, which containeth both 
many places and many times? And doe they not knowe, that a Tragedie is 
tied to the lawes of Poesie, and not of Historie ? not bound to follow the 
storie, but having liberty, either to faine a quite newe matter, or to frame the 
history to the most tragicall conveniencie. Againe, many things may be told 
which cannot be shewed, if they knowe the difference betwixt reporting and 
representing. As for example, I may speake (though I am heere) of Peru, 
and in speech digresse from that to the description of Calicut : but in action, 
I cannot represent it without Pacolets horse : and so was the manner the 
Auncients tooke, by some Nuncius to recount thinges done in former time, or 
other place. 

" But beside these grosse absurdities, how all theyr Playes be neither right 
Tragedies, nor right Comedies : mingling Kings and Clownes, not because 
the matter so carrieth it : but thrust in Clownes by head and shoulders, to 
play a part in maiesticall matters, with neither decencie nor discretion. So as 
neither the admiration and commiseration, nor the right sportfulness, is by 
their mungrell Tragy-comedie obtained. I know Apuleius did some- what 
so, but that is a thing recounted with space of time, not represented in 
one moment : and I knowe, the Auncients have one or two examples of 
Tragy-comedies, as Plautus hath Amphitrio. But if we marke them well, we 
shall find that they never, or very daintily, match Horn-pypes and Funeralls. 
So falleth it out, that, having indeed no right Comedy, in that comicall part of 
our Tragedy we have nothing but scurrility, unwoorthy of any chast eares : or 
some extreame shew of doltishness, indeed fit to lift up a loude laughter and 
nothing els : where the whole tract of a Comedy shoulde be full of delight, 
as the Tragedy shoulde be still maintained in a well raised admiration." 

3 Cf. Ben Jonson, Prologue to Every Man out of his Humour, 1599, where 
a reasonable inference is drawn from the fact that dramatic form has had a 
historical development, to the conclusion that all precepts concerning it are 
subject to modification in accordance with felt needs that may emerge. Cf. 
also Polonius in Hamlet, " The best actors in the world," etc. 



156 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



complicated organic structure of Latin comedy, with its five 
acts and separate scenes. He is more careful than his rude 
predecessors to motive or excuse his violation of the unities. 
He observes, except in the histories, with hardly any devia- 
tion, the sharp distinction between tragedy and comedy which 
Dante applied so strangely. 1 That is to say, in the plays of 
which the catastrophe is not tragic, the happy ending or 
reconciliation is absolutely complete, and no irrevocable mis- 
fortune befalls any character in the play. Cloten in Cymbe- 
line, and Antigonus in the Winters Tale, are the only excep- 
tions to this rule outside the historical dramas, which are the 
continuance of a pre-Shakespearian and romantic form of play. 
By the great place he gives to histories, therefore, he so far 
defies the traditional classification of dramatic form. More- 
over he refuses to employ the choruses, to observe the unities, 
or to push the distinction between tragedy and comedy so far 
as to dissociate the former from the humour that belongs to 
every complete representation of life. 

And in thus accepting a dramatic form he has accepted 
its freedom from personal reference. Perhaps in one well- 
known passage there is some playful malice against an old 
enemy. Otherwise, as is only too clear to us, there is no 
self-betrayal in Shakespeare. Even the story of the sonnets 
has practically to be accepted in its universal meaning. Its 
personal reference, whether ascertainable or not, is not 
woven into the texture of the poems. What a contrast with 
Dante ! 

Thus in Shakespeare's poetic form the later or classical 
Renaissance is modifying the earlier creative or romantic 
Renaissance. And in this he differs from Dante, whose form 
is unique, individual, even personal. 

The Kind of sig-- 3* With regard to subject-matter and kind of 
nificance aimed significance a parallel contrast may be noted. 

Dante's subject-matter is nominally the other 
world. However profoundly he may conceive the unity of the 
soul's fate after death with its terrestrial action and character, 
this primary peculiarity colours his whole artistic scheme. 
Unity and symmetry of parts in the whole, which to him, as 



1 "A tragic beginning and a comic ending" seems to have been a stock 
mediaeval phrase for " a good beginning and a happy ending." See Dante to 
Can Grande, sect. io. 



ALLEGORY IN DANTE. 



i57 



to the earlier mediaeval writers, constituted beauty, 1 is no doubt 
the ultimate burden of his thought, but the vehicle of its 
expression is a dualism. In this it represents the mediaeval 
or early modern mind whose utterance it was. The same fate 
had befallen the kingdom of heaven that befel Plato's ideas. 
The very principle of unity itself was hardened into something 
material, at all events into something sensuous, and was set 
in opposition over against that of which it was meant to be 
the unity, as "another" world against "this." Such a course 
of thought was inevitable. Reality, for early ages, must mean 
material reality, and the spiritual world could not become an 
object of popular belief except as a non-terrestrial abiding- 
place. This first dualism between our world of images and 
the other world of images, forms the content of Dante ; but 
beside and behind it there is also another, the dualism of the 
entire universe of sense-images over against its spiritual or 
moral meaning. This dualism within a dualism is never 
wholly absent from views to which heaven and hell are the 
necessary complement of earth. 

And thus the visions of Dante's art were in the first place 
fantastic, being dislocated from their human context, and 
thrown into a shape in accordance with the imagination of a 
world beyond the grave ; and secondly they were consciously 
and intentionally allegorical or symbolical. He accepted the 
four concurrent senses acknowledged by mediaeval canons 
of interpretation, 2 as illustrated by himself in the following 
paragraph from his letter to Can Grande, (c.7.). " In order 
to a clear understanding of what I am about to say, you must 
know that the sense of this work [The Commedia] is 
not simple; rather the work might be called 'of many senses.' 
For there is one sense which is got from the letter, and 
another which is got from the things signified by the letter ; 
and the former is called literal, the latter allegorical or mysti- 
cal. This mode of treatment, for the better understanding of 
it, may be considered in the case of these verses : ' When 
Israel came out of Egypt, and the house of Jacob from among 

1 CbnvitO) ii. 5 ; cf. Paradiso, i. 103 : 

" Le cose tutte quante 
Hann' ordine tra loro ; e questo h forma, 
Che 1' universo a Dio fa somigliante." 

2 "jLitera gesta docet : quid credas allegoria, 

' Moralis quid agas ; quid speres anagogia." — Fraticelli. 



158 



HISTORY OF AESTHETIC. 



a strange people, Judah was His sanctification [Vulgate] and 
Israel His dominion. 1 For if we look at the letter alone, 
there is signified to us the exodus of the children of Israel 
from Egypt in the time of Moses ; if at the allegory, our 
redemption by Christ ; if at the moral sense, the conversion 
of the soul from the grief and misery of sin to a state of grace ; 
if at the anagogic [elevating sense], the exodus of the holy soul 
from the bondage of corruption to the liberty of eternal glory. 
And although these mystic senses are called by different 
names, yet generally they may all be called allegorical, seeing 
that they are different from the literal or historical. For 
' allegoria ' is called so from the Greek aWoios, which means 
in Latin ' alienum ' or 'diversum.'" 

Are these two elements, then, the fantastic element resting 
upon the subordination of this world to the next, and the alle- 
gorical and abstract element resting on the subordination of 
all perceptible forms to a whole hierarchy of spiritual or ethical 
interpretations, — are these what is demanded by a theory which 
gives the weight we have persistently claimed to creative 
imagination and spiritual symbolism in the analysis of beauty ? 
Certainly they do not impress us in this way, when thus set 
out in abstract language, for, to mention no other objection, it 
would seem that thus taken anything could be made to mean 
anything, so that all reality and definiteness in the perception 
of beauty would be destroyed. If beauty indeed lies in sym- 
bolic meaning, and if symbolic meaning is utterly arbitrary, 
then we ask with Fra Lippo Lippi : 

"Why for this 
What need of art at all ? A skull and bones, 
Two bits of wood nailed crosswise, or, what's best, 
A bell to chime the hours with, does as well." 

I hope that the distinction which solves this paradox will 
become clear of itself, through the very contrast which we are 
now engaged in considering. But with reference to Dante 
and mysticism in general, I must recall the principle whi'ch I 
have insisted on more than once before, 2 namely that; the 
aesthetic value of mysticism, like the scientific value of alchemy, 
lies not in its precepts but in its practice. A man is r\ot a 
great artist because he is prepared to see in everything, - in a 
beautiful woman, in a classical poet, in a wood or a mountain, 

. — — p • 

1 Quoted in Purgatorio, ii. 46. 2 Ch. 2 and ch. 6 supra. 



SOUND IN DANTE. 



159 



or in the extraordinary attitudes or sufferings of human beings, 
types of theology and science, of ignorance, aspiration, and 
various kinds of sin ; this general tendency of mind Dante 
merely shared with the whole middle age from Plotinus down- 
ward. But yet, the faith in a meaning is a great assistance to 
looking for one ; and as a general rule the more a man looks 
for, the more he will see. Beauty, in short, thus ceases to be 
a datum, and becomes a problem ; and in pursuing a fanciful 
interpretation, the mind will often extract the expressive 
essence of sensuous forms, with incomparable subtlety. Dante 
is not a great poet because in speaking of a she-wolf he signi- 
fies by it at once the temporal power of the Pope and the sin 
of avarice ; but because in his intentness upon the issue and 
the meaning, nothing that has a natural significance escapes 
his eye and ear. The place of sound in the Commedia, though 
suggested by Vergil, 1 is so developed into importance as to be 
something new to art ; much of the horror of the Inferno con- 
sists in it, while the beauty of its introduction in the Paradiso 
gives that part of the poem almost a lyrical character. 2 Re- 
markable as is Dante's love and perception of light, 3 in which 
he follows the mediaeval tradition, and probably the superstition 
inherited from Plotinus, yet the modern theorist cannot com- 
plain that he has inadequately recognised the power of sound. 
And the same is true of human speech and gesture. No 
Hellene, however skilled a spectator in the theatre of this life, 
has portrayed the beauty and terror of visible and audible 
things with so true and piercing a touch as this mystic 
hierophant of another world. 

In the art of Shakespeare, as distinguished from his private 
life and opinions, with which we are not here concerned, we 
find neither this kind of subject matter nor this kind of signi- 
ficance. 

In the first place, the balance of forces in the machine of 
humanity is for him not seriously affected by what lies beyond 
the grave. We could disregard "the life to come" ; what 
affects our action is that "we still have judgment here" — an 
antithesis with Dante, which is really profound, but appears 
even profounder than it is if we fail to realise how for Dante 



1 sE?i. 6. 426. " Continue* auditse voces," etc. 

2 Schelling, I.e. 

3 See_Church's Essay on Dante for a collection of passages. 



i6o 



HISTORY OF AESTHETIC. 



too, heaven and hell lay ultimately in character. Yet when 
all this is allowed for, the difference remains immense. The 
first of the two dualisms which we found in the middle age, has 
in Shakespeare almost ceased to exist, and with it disappears 
the fantastic side of imagination, the dislocation of the visible 
world. Just here and there the presentation of real con- 
nexions is bordered or interwoven with a playful or mysterious 
supernatural, which does no more than furnish a decorative 
heightening to the true line of causal construction. So far 
then, in sheer form of imagination, Shakespeare reverts to- 
wards the Greeks ; for their world also was one, and their 
divine was not supernatural. But the one world of Shake- 
speare included all that was not fantastic, all that was not 
mere machinery in the two worlds of the middle age ; and his 
naturalism therefore was on a different plane from that of the 
Greeks. It was in the very widest sense a romantic as con- 
trasted with a classical naturalism. 

And the second dualism, which we found in Dante, also 
ceased to exist, as a dualism affecting the form of imagin- 
ation, in Shakespeare. Conscious allegory or symbolism, in 
which a thing and its meaning are two, like a riddle and its 
answer, was to Shakespeare a form of mediaeval pedantry, 
just as the dramatic unities were a form of classical pedantry. 
Nothing does more to bring him near to us as a modern of 
the moderns than his easy superiority and cultured experience 
in face of the pseudo-classical and romantic oddities that had 
come down to his age. The allegory or arbitrary symbol is dis- 
cussed between Pistol and Fluellen ; the "elegancy and facility 
and golden cadence of poetry," insisted on by Holofernes ; 1 
the figure in rhetoric is given over to Touchstone, and the 
syllogism and law of identity to the clown in Twelfth Night. 
Indeed, without pressing dramatic expression into doctrine, it 
is fair to take note of Hamlet's sentences, "for anything so 
overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at 
the first and now, was, and is, to hold as t'were the mirror up 
to nature ; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own 
image, and the very age, and body of the time, his form and 
pressure." Whether by chance or by some freak of tradition, 



1 It is Holofernes who says " Imitari is nothing, so doth the ape his 
keeper" ; and seems to prefer "the flowers of fancy, the jerks of invention." 
Is this a chance satire on some rebellion against the Greek theory of art ? 



FROM TWO WORLDS TO ONE. 



I 6 L 



these words accept for the drama (I do not think that "play- 
ing" need here be sharply distinguished from the play) the 
very comparison by which Plato believes himself to represent 
the utter worthlessness of poetry, of the unreal making of 
things. It may be worth while to re- quote his words, which 
are cited in chap. II. of this work. "There are many ways in 
which this feat (of 'making' everything) might be accom- 
plished, none quicker than that of turning a mirror round and 
round — you would soon make the sun and the heaven and 
the earth, and yourself, and the animals, and plants, and all 
the other creations of art as well as of nature, in the mirror." 
Thus once more, in comparison with Dante, we are back 
among the Greeks. Something indeed in the phrase which 
Shakespeare throws out even thus by the way, "the body of 
the time," "his form and pressure," indicates the representation 
of life as a whole, of a tendency, and a spirit, and so far modi- 
fies the simile of the mirror. But the artificial symbol, the 
reality, not merely wrenched apart into separate worlds, but 
cut and thinned down to fit its abstract meaning, has dis- 
appeared along with the hierarchy of separate interpretations ; 
and, if we are to consider only the great world- epochs of 
the aesthetic consciousness, is gone for ever. 

But though the machinery of spiritual interpretation is 
thrown aside, the essence of it survives as a permanent gain. 
The value of human souls and the significance of their 
destiny 1 are no longer operative as abstract principles to be 
clothed in allegorical fantasy, but as an added force and 
tenderness in the penetrative imagination. It is worth while 
even to point out that as nature repeats herself with a differ- 
ence in the phases of evolution, a relation justly perceived in 
one part, will as a rule bear a genuine analogy to many 
relations on other planes of experience ; and therefore even 



1 " Is it true that we are now, and shall be hereafter 
But what or where depends on life's minute ? 
Hails heavenly cheer, or infernal laughter 
Our first step out of the gulf, or in it ? 
Shall man, such step within his endeavour, 
Man's face, have no more play and action 
Than joy that is crystallised for ever, 
Or grief, an eternal petrifaction ? " 

Browning, Old Pictures i?i Florence. 



M 



HISTORY OF AESTHETIC. 



the hierarchy of allegorical meanings, if its fantastic or arbitrary 
element were withdrawn, might turn out something more real 
than was known by those who formulated it. At any rate, 
the " reasons," laws or powers which work in man and in nature 
are now represented in their operation as character and ex- 
pression, not outside it as Deity, or theological principle, or 
reward and punishment. Thus the definition of Plotinus, 
identifying beauty with the expression of the rational, was for 
the first time fulfilled without abstraction or divorce of the 
elements involved in it, and the mediaeval aspiration to see 
the universe as beautiful in spite of all its contradictions, was 
accomplished with even a more perfect unity than that re- 
vealed by Dante. 

The true Relations a In concluding the comparison which forms 

of the later i i • r i • i 111 

Renaissance, the subject of this chapter, we must recall the two 
conceptions of the Renaissance which we spoke of as linking 
it respectively with what came after and with what went before. 

We are accustomed in accordance with the former habit 
of thought to regard Shakespeare mainly as the creator of 
our present poetic world, and the inaugurator of our national 
greatness in the field of literature. Now in one sense this 
is all very true. He forms the most brilliant starting point 
of our literary art, just as Newton does of our science and 
Locke of our philosophy. But if we think that our art and 
its conditions are continuous with his art and its conditions, 
and that the perception of beauty as a living and active 
force was awakened in his time and has had a continuous 
development from then till now, in that case I imagine 
we are deceived. Within the history of the concrete feeling 
for beauty, to which poetry, and especially the drama be- 
longs on one side, though it also borders closely upon the 
province of intellect, Shakespeare in every way marks not 
the opening but the close of a period. Since him there has 
been no national drama. To-day in England the drama, in 
the sense of stage-plays which are poetic literature, does not 
exist. And I imagine that what of this kind exists elsewhere, 
and has existed since the middle of the seventeenth century, is 
only enough to show clearly that some conditions, whatever 
they may be, have during all that time been hostile to dramatic 
art. By the year 1600 the genuine productive impulse of the 
earlier Renaissance — the only productive impulse which the 



END OF THE AGE OF ART. 



163 



Renaissance contained — had already exhausted itself every- 
where but in England, where it was later felt. Our two most 
competent critics agree in substance though probably not in 
feeling about the import of that painting by Raphael in the 
Vatican, which seems to set heathen poetry under Apollo on 
an equality with Christian doctrine under Christ. 1 And this 
room in the Vatican had been painted about 1508. Since 
then, although new movements of an isolated kind were 
preparing, the rich and simple beauty which was rooted in the 
middle age had become a thing of the past. Mannerism and 
the classical Renaissance on one side, science and philosophy 
(Descartes was born in 1596), the reformation, the English 
revolution, industrial changes, and the spread of printed liter- 
ature on the other, were rapidly making an end of the great 
artistic and architectural age of the modern world. Nothing 
is more striking than the present revulsion of feeling on the 
part of the most competent judges, against the architecture of 
St. Peter's at Rome. 2 

To condemn a revolution of this kind is like condemning 
the course of nature. After the flower, the fruit ; no plant 
flowers for ever and all the year round. Shakespeare had, 
as we saw, the good fortune to come at the very close of the 
great creative time, bringing his pregnant and plastic genius 
to meet the growing influence of free thought and classic 
tradition, so that by wonderful good fortune he was able to 
deal with the whole mass of romantic material in a spirit of 
natural freedom that was almost classical. It was perhaps as 
well that he was not conversant with the Athenian dramatists. 
A single simile of Euripides, it is said, is all that can be proved 
to have filtered through, by translation and retranslation, from 
the great Greek tragedians to Shakespeare. It comes through 
" the Jocastaof George Gascoigne and Francis Kinwelmersh " 
(1566), a motley and incongruous piece built on the model of 



1 Ruskin, Lectures on Painting and Architecture, p. 213, says this was the 
Mene, Tekel, Upharsin, of the arts of Christianity. Mr. Pater, Renaissance, 
p. 186, says, "it is the classical tradition, the orthodoxy of taste, that RafTaelle 
commemorates." Irenaeus (end of second century, a.d.) says that Gnostics 
set up images of Christ along with those of Plato and Aristotle. The same 
point was passed twice, first with faces set to leave paganism, and next with 
faces set to return to it. 

2 See Mr. Wm. Morris, quoted above, p. 125. 



164 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



the Phcenissce, x really translated from the Italian without any 
trace of an appeal to the original, and it suggested the 
splendid passage in Hotspur's speech: "By heaven, methinks 

it were an easy leap " It is impossible to suppose that 

even Shakespeare's genius, lightly as it dealt with Plutarch 
and Ovid, and with Plautus and Seneca, would have stood up 
quite unshrinkingly before yEschylus and Sophocles. It 
appears to us that in his case the true equilibrium of form and 
matter was attained, and that any further reinforcement of 
the influence of antiquity might have impaired that singleness 
of vision which makes him not only the last artist of the age of 
mediaeval romance, but the first of that age which we rather 
hope for than have arrived at, the age of romantic classicism 
or modern classical naturalism. 

For the pseudo-classical tradition, which, seconded by the 
peculiar fulness and force of the time, was for the moment a 
purifying factor in art, had many transformations to undergo 
before it again became anything but a noxious influence in the 
concrete aesthetic consciousness. Ultimately, indeed, through 
centuries of theory and criticism, it led back to a knowledge 
of genuine Hellenic life and art and ideas. And the best 
perhaps that this knowledge in the hands of Lessing, Winck- 
elmann, and Goethe did for art was to set it free from the 
fetters which a shallower knowledge had imposed. But in 
the purely intellectual region very great things sprang from 
this deeper and more genuine knowledge, and among these 
great things there arose, as the course of general speculation 
on its side demanded, a vital and profound aesthetic philo- 
sophy, which in its turn contributed a factor of very great 
value to the general speculation of the early nineteenth century. 

Esthetic theory, then, as true philosophy develops, loses, 
and rightly loses, its practical relation as a guide to art ; and 
the work of the best aesthetic theorists has been in a great 
measure to protest against that very misapplication of abstract 
precept to art which was a survival, in the wrong place, of 
the same critical tradition that had been the forerunner 
of true aesthetic theory. If, besides this negative function, 



1 Mahaffy's Hist, of Greek Literature, i. 366. The original in Euripides 
runs (jP/icenissce, 504, Eteocles) — 

acrrpoiv av iXOoijx alOepos 7rpos avroAas 
Kal yrjs e.vep0€, Swaros Spacrai raSe, 
rr]V #ea>F peyLCTTrjv war' ^X €LV Tvpavviha.. 



EFFECT OF CLASSICAL TRADITION. 



165 



aesthetic philosophy can ever have a positive value for 
artistic creation, it can only be in the very secondary sense in 
which hrst through technical philosophy, and then through 
popular culture, it may insist on the relation of beauty to life, 
and explain that, for example, to "imitate" the Hellenes in 
the true sense is not to copy their sculpture, but to be, mutatis 
mutandis, such men as they were. The greatest of all new 
departures since the time of Shakespeare — the art of music 
and that of landscape painting — have been wholly independent 
both of aesthetic theory and of Hellenic example ; and although 
the widening of our world by the recovery of antique master- 
pieces cannot but be helpful when their effect has, so to speak, 
passed into the blood of our aesthetic organism, yet I imagine 
that Greek literature has clone little directly for our greater 
poets, and that study from the Elgin marbles has been an 
influence not without its danger for our painters. 

True aesthetic speculation, on the other hand, has been 
throughout in the profoundest sympathy with the new depar- 
tures and growing freedom of that sense of beauty, from 
which its material is drawn. So far indeed as in passing it 
may permit itself to judge rather than to understand, which 
latter is its only true function, it laments the difficulty and 
interruption which has been experienced by the European 
mind since Shakespeare's time, in carrying forward the large 
and free expression of life in art which he inaugurated. 
Whether the future will show more continuity, and less that 
seems to be distraction and reaction belonging to a level 
which Shakespeare has transcended, it is not for us to predict. 
Our immediate task is go forward, through the awaking of 
free speculation and the deepening of current criticism, to the 
development of aesthetic flheory as an integral element in 
modern philosophy. 



CHAPTER VIII. 



THE PROBLEM OF MODERN AESTHETIC PHILOSOPHY. 

The Process of i. The beautiful is of interest to metaphysic 
Preparation. as fo Q tangible meeting point of reason and 
feeling, and to criticism as the expression of human life in 
its changing phases and conditions. The combination of 
these two interests, after a protracted separate development, 
is the true genesis of modern aesthetic. Under the term 
criticism I understand for this purpose the whole detailed 
work of reflective thought in the exploration and appreciation 
of particular beautiful things, including therefore the services 
of classical scholarship in making accessible the great writers 
of Hellas, the labour of archaeologists both in disinterring and 
interpreting the treasures of Herculaneum and the other 
remains of the antique world, and finally the activity of 
art criticism in the narrower sense, as the literary judgment 
passed upon works that claim to be beautiful, with reference 
to their beauty. 

In a general sense it might therefore be said that criticism 
from Sidney and Scaliger to Lessing and Winckelmann fur- 
nished aesthetic philosophy with its data, while metaphysic 
from Descartes to Kant supplied it with postulates or a prob- 
lem. In each of these streams of thought further combina- 
tions of tributaries may be traced, and between them are all 
kinds of cross-connections. But the main distinction will, I 
believe, approve itself as just. 
The Prolonged 2 ' * n tnese preparatory processes, each of them 
interruption of extending over a period to be measured by cen- 
s e 1C " turies, we may find the key to a difficulty which 
necessarily confronts the student at the point we have now 
reached. 

This difficulty, in its widest extent, 1 arises from the inter- 



1 The view referred to in the following pages is that of Schasler, Aesthetik, 
Buch II., Einleitung. I have attempted to indicate his conception, and my 
deviations from it, without the extreme lengthiness which a formal discussion 
of it would involve. 

166 



LATENESS OF MODERN /ESTHETIC. 



T67 



mission of aesthetic philosophy, considered as a theoretical 
study of fine art, from the time of Plotinus to the eighteenth 
century of our era. 

But we may at once deduct from the period during which 
the absence of such theory is remarkable by far the larger 
part of the interval in question ; that is to say, the whole of the 
middle age down to the fourteenth century. The reason how- 
ever for which we may so deduct it is not that which an 
obsolete conception of the Renaissance is ready to assign. It 
is not that in the middle age there was no practical aesthetic 
consciousness, and therefore no object-matter to which a 
theoretical study of art could have been directed. 1 There 
was no aesthetic consciousness, it is said, because art was 
purely the handmaid to theology, and was not yet alive to its 
true purpose of creating the beautiful. Such an explanation 
combines a historical blunder with a philosophical fallacy. 
The actual aesthetic consciousness of the middle age was as 
a historical fact the most continuous and creative that the 
world has ever seen. And although for long centuries it was 
inarticulate in the more intellectually imaginative regions, and 
accepted theology, perhaps, as the expression of its essential 
instincts, yet to set this fact down as precluding its claim to 
rank as an aesthetic consciousness at all is to commit the 
serious philosophical confusion of identifying the concrete ex- 
pressive impulse with the reflective aesthetic intention. So 
far from its being true that there is no genuine art-conscious- 
ness where there is no intentional aim at beauty for beauty's 
sake, it is probable that such intentional aim is at least a 
grave danger to art, if not a sure symptom of decadence. It 
is not the case, then, that the absence of detailed aesthetic 
research during the middle age was owing to the absence of 
any object-matter for such research. It was owing not to 
the lack of an art-consciousness, but to the very directness of 
the art-impulse, combined with the pressure of those other 
needs and problems which belong to the youth of a new 
civilization, and which invariably hinder the mind of such an 
age from reflecting systematically upon its own productions. 
The elements of theoretical asceticism on the one hand, and 
of theoretical recognition of beauty in the universe on the 
other, which we traced throughout this period, only show that 



1 Schasler, I.e. 



168 



HISTORY OF ^ESTHETIC. 



it was not the first but the second youth of the world — a 
second youth dealing according to its wants in naive and 
uncritical fashion with ideas handed down from a first matu- 
rity. A self-criticising theory could no more be expected of 
such an age, in spite of its not small intellectual equipment, 
than of Athens before the time of Socrates. 

But there still remains to be considered the period after the 
culmination of religious art in the fifteenth century, when prima 
facie it would appear that the object-matter of aesthetic existed 
in abundance ; and with regard to this period the question 
has been urged, " Why did not the full growth of modern 
aesthetic follow in two generations upon the art of Raphael, 
as that of ancient aesthetic did upon the art of Pheidias?" 
The answer given appears to me to be a false application of 
a simple truth. Ancient art, it is said, was practically com- 
plete when its religious inspiration had attained full expres- 
sion ; but the modern mind is reflective or divided, and 
modern art — the object-matter necessary as a condition pre- 
cedent of aesthetic theory — was not complete till the cycle of 
secular as well as of religious interest had been traversed by 
it in a continuous advance lasting till the eighteenth century. 
Now of course in the largest sense the cycle of modern art is 
not complete even to-day, and we hope that it never will be. 
But relatively speaking, the great art-age of the world did begin 
to draw to its close in Raphael, although by special causes it 
was prolonged in other countries so as just to cover our 
Shakespearian drama. Therefore the question is wrongly put, 
for the completion of the same single and continuous period 
to which, religious art belonged, falls after Shakespeare and 
not after Raphael ; and the answer is erroneous, inasmuch as 
it assumes a natural progress even in pictorial art from the 
sixteenth century onwards ; whereas really there was then set- 
ting in the close of a period, only somewhat disguised by vari- 
ous forms and rates of disintegration in different European 
countries. 

The reflectiveness, range and versatility of the modern 
mind is rightly appreciated in the question and answer which 
we have examined ; but they fail to give weight to the 
distinction between such secularisation of art as that of 
Raphael's successors, which marks the end of the great 
period, and is itself a decadence not because it is non-religious, 
but because it is no longer an expression of vigorous life; and 



LATENESS OF MODERN /ESTHETIC. 



169 



such secularisation as that of the Elizabethan drama, which 
belongs by its colour, strength and profoundness to the 
middle age, though touched and liberated by more modern 
influences. 

After the Elizabethan drama in England, and earlier still 
in Italy, the impulse of the middle age was exhausted, and 
art had entered upon its chequered modern career, which did 
not attain any special completion in the eighteenth century 
such as would account by itself for the rise at that time of 
aesthetic speculation. The proof of this statement with regard 
to the close of a great continuous artistic age throughout the 
cultured countries of Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth 
centuries could only be given by a complete survey of the 
history of all those minor forms of beautiful workmanship 
which are an absolutely infallible test of the extent and solidity 
with which practical aesthetic consciousness is engrained in 
the mind of any age. There has not been in any country of 
Europe since the beginning of the seventeenth century a 
generation really fertile in beautiful production, whether in 
architecture, sculpture, metal-work or wood-carving. It is on 
this ground, combined with the peculiar changes that passed 
over painting and poetry themselves at the time referred to, 
that we may safely affirm the position of art in Europe since 
the sixteenth century, however occasionally brilliant, to have 
been quite different from that which it occupied before. 

Our question then is, not, why did aesthetic fail to arise 
directly after the time of Raphael, but rather, why did it fail 
to arise directly after the time of Shakespeare ? And the 
answer is, not that art retained continuous vitality till the 
eighteenth century, so that before that time the material of 
aesthetic was incomplete ; but that the peculiar nature of this 
material in modern times, consisting largely of a tradition alien 
to modern life, demanded a long process of critical apprecia- 
tion before its content could fairly reach the mind. It is quite 
true that the modern consciousness, in comparison with the 
ancient, is divided and not single. The mere territorial exten- 
sion and national subdivision of the area of European culture 
in the seventeenth century is enough to bring this sharply 
before us when we compare it with the Athenian period, or 
even with that of Hellenism or Greco- Roman civilisation, 
though this had great territorial extension and some tinge of 
local colour. The architecture, painting, language and litera- 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



ture of France, Italy, and England alone, down to the seven- 
teenth century, form a material which could not be organised 
by reflection in one or two generations. And yet this was 
only, relatively speaking, one factor in the problem presented 
to theory. Each of the two great streams of intellectual 
activity, that of philosophy and that of criticism, had not only 
to absorb a present, that is, a recent past, of immense compli- 
cation, but had also to adjust itself to antitheses bequeathed by 
the remoter past called antiquity, both in its own content, and 
in its relation to the present. Till these two processes were 
completed, and their results were ready to combine, there 
could be no fertile aesthetic. 

3. The philosophical preparation of the aesthetic 
P the?robiem f problem, like the critical preparation of the 
Descartes aesthetic data, includes more than one tendency. 

to Baumgarten. ' , ■ j 

As ultimately stated in Kant s Lmtiqzie of the 
Power of Judgment, that problem was the outcome of those 
two tendencies of modern thought, which determined his entire 
philosophy — itself a statement of this same problem in all the 
principal shapes which it was capable of assuming. 

i. As a first approximation to indicating the 
Tendencies, nature of these two tendencies, we may mention 
"Universal" and them under the technical names "universal" and 

"Individual." .,..,,„ . . . ^ . , , 

" individual respectively ; the Cartesian school 
with its descendant, the Leibnitz-Wolffian philosophy, being 
marked, on the whole, by insistence on the aspect of rational 
system and necessary connection in the universe (a tendency to 
which the peculiar monadic theory of Leibnitz forms no real 
exception) ; while the British empirical school, from Bacon to 
David Hume, started rather from individual feeling or sense- 
perception, and required that the theory of reality should be 
derivative from what this was supposed to announce. In the 
eighteenth century this latter mood was backed by all the 
forces of the time, especially by the passionate sentimentalism 
of Rousseau and the less philosophical scepticism of V oltaire. 

But the logical terms " universal " and " individual " do not 
give us much help in appreciating the real nature of the ten- 
dencies thus described. In all conceptions that have ever 
approved themselves to reason, whether in ancient or modern 
times, the factors thus designated necessarily find a place. 
We must therefore, if we wish to get nearer our subject than 
this general approximation, distinguish the particular shape in 



"UNIVERSAL" AND " INDIVIDUAL." 



171 



which the universal and the individual tendency reveal them- 
selves in modern philosophy before Kant, first from the shape 
which they took in classical antiquity, and secondly from the 
shape which each one of them takes within the current of 
thought in which the other is predominant. If we can make 
this clear, we shall have done all that is needed to explain 
Kant's philosophical attitude towards aesthetic questions, and 
happily we are not called upon to undertake the gigantic task 
of narrating the whole development of pre-Kantian specu- 
lation. For philosophy proper, by which I mean the 
speculations of men who are known as thinkers on other 
grounds than their contributions to aesthetic criticism, reveals 
its extraordinarily abstract character during this period by an 
almost entire omission to deal with aesthetic questions, under 
this or any other name. What little demands remark in Shaftes- 
bury, Leibnitz and Baumgarten — Lord Kaimes, Lessing, and 
Burke being counted among the critics, and not among 
the philosophers — we shall find occasion to notice in ex- 
plaining the tendencies to which they severally belong. 
jiM^^^u^^A ii. First then, we are to distinguish the " uni- 
from Ancient versal and individual tendencies of such 
Philosophy. ^^^^ as D escar tes and Locke respectively 
from the corresponding tendencies in any philosophers of 
antiquity ; let us say, of the Stoics on the one hand and of 
Epicureans on the other, 

We should begin by noting the difficulty of finding ade- 
quate contrasted examples of such tendencies in classical 
philosophy. In Plato and Aristotle, for instance, the two 
factors of thought are fairly in equilibrium, and we could hardly 
find, to set against either of these thinkers, a school of real 
importance in whom the balance was notably different. 
W T hile if we compare the Eleatics with the Atomists or with 
Heraclitus, we feel that the antithesis with which we are deal- 
ing has no depth of application, such as the modern antagon- 
ism between free-will and necessity, or between passion and 
reason. This difficulty of finding a good example shows 
how little, comparatively speaking, the ancient mind was torn 
and dragged asunder by the conflicting claims of partial ele- 
ments in human nature each striving to pass for the whole. 

But further, if we look at such a contrast as that between 
Stoics and Epicureans, in which the mind of the old world is 
beginning to pursue divergent ideals after a more modern 



172 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



fashion, we see that the antagonism is far less internecine 
than its modern representative. On the one hand, neither of 
these aspects of life is irreconcilably differentiated from the 
other which is its complement ; on the other hand, neither 
makes so jealous and exclusive a claim to be all that there is, 
and to annihilate its opposite out of the reasonable world. 
Stoicism is the outcome of one mood, Epicureanism of another. 
They are no doubt controversial in so far as they consist in 
rival theories, but each of them was to a great extent a way 
of life, and its adherents chose a path which suited their own 
tastes and did not bring them into conflict with the others. 
But, as we have amply seen, the characteristic of the Chris- 
tian mind is to lay claim to the universe as belonging to the 
individual soul. Nothing is indifferent to this mind ; God is 
everywhere, and wherever He is there is something for man 
to know, to do, or to enjoy. During the long centuries of the 
middle age this faith had been formulated in positive doctrine, 
and had embodied itself unconsciously in the widening range 
of sensuous perception and pleasurable production, so that 
when the flower of formative art had passed away, and the 
free intellect of Christendom began to re-construct its world 
in terms of self-conscious reason, both " universal " and " indi- 
vidual " points of view asserted themselves only as deeper 
complications within a frame of mind which to begin with 
was pre-eminently individual. The infinite value of a soul 
was a lesson too deeply bought to be readily forgotten. 

Thus the two tendencies of modern thought are distin- 
guished from their ancient correlatives by their common point 
of departure in the thinking, feeling and perceiving subject. 
Scepticism, which marked the close of ancient philosophy, 
characterised the beginning of modern speculation. Augustine, 
as we saw, very nearly anticipated the principle that my 
thought involves my existence, or rather, in Augustine's words, 
that my doubt implies my thought ; 1 and on some such basis, 
the basis of existence as a separate but thinking being, the 
thinking, feeling and percipient subject in modern times de- 
liberately invades the system of things, with the conviction 
that it will certainly find therein what it demands ; either a 
reasonable framework according to causal laws, or general 
truths in harmony with observed phenomena, or a life that 



Page 134 above. 



REASON AND FEELING. 



I 73 



will respond to its moral or hedonistic requirements. All that 
it finds is expected or required to be in conformity with the 
organ or faculty of the subject, so that starting from itself as 
centre it can critically verify and reconstruct the world, from 
which it began by ideally isolating itself. There is nothing in 
antiquity at all comparable to the combined feeling of exter- 
nality and of assured dominion with which Bacon and Des- 
cartes look out upon phenomena. 

And from iii. This being the general type of modern as 
each other, contrasted with ancient speculation, for which the 
history of the post-classical decadence and of the middle age 
has I hope prepared the reader, we have further to ask how, 
within this individual or modern mood, the ineradicable im- 
pulses known as "universal" and " individual " again assert 
themselves in philosophy. The history of philosophy appears 
to answer the question in the most straightforward way. In 
Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Wolff, Baumgarten we find a 
continuous march of thought which is abstractly rational and 
intellectual ; in Bacon, Locke, Shaftesbury, Berkeley, Hume, 
Rousseau, we recognise an empirical or sensationalist ten- 
dency no less abstract. The two streams meet in Kant, and 
it is their convergence in his system that sets the problem to 
later modern speculation as a whole, and more especially and 
distinctively, owing to the peculiar conditions of this problem, to 
modern aesthetic speculation. " How can the sensuous and the 
ideal world be reconciled ?" is the general problem; "how can a 
pleasurable feeling partake of the character of reason ?" is the 
same problem in its special aesthetic form. 

But we have further to note, as a characteristic of the 
modern temper, that inasmuch as each of the philosophical 
tendencies is theoretical and controversial, claiming absolute 
and exclusive universality, the logical force of facts compels 
each of them to be represented within the line of progression 
mainly dominated by the other ; and it is therefore only by 
comparison, and in virtue of their respective bases and as- 
sumed points of departure, that the one chief course of thought 
is distinguished from the other. Bacon, who championed the 
cause of "particulars" as if they were an oppressed population, 
held himself to be the very prophet of exact science — the 
abstract universal ; — and Hume, whose point of departure is 
the isolated sensuous impression, not only admits the universal 
under the name of a fiction, but in his entire scope and method 



174 



HISTORY OF AESTHETIC. 



of reasoning is guided by a spirit of abstract analysis which 
makes him, though the extremest of sensationalists in 
metaphysic, a utilitarian rationalist wherever he touches on 
aesthetic. 1 

In the Cartesian school, on the other hand, the starting point 
is the abstract universal or the systematic intelligence, in terms 
of which feeling and sensation are taken into account only as 
obscure or confused ideas. Although in Leibnitz there is a 
concession to individualism, as against the monotonous ab- 
straction of Spinoza, yet the system retains its purely intel- 
lectual form, and the estimation of sensation and feeling as 
inferior species of intellectual idea was adopted by Wolff, and 
in Baumgarten's hands determined the point of view under 
which aesthetic was for the first time enrolled among the 
accepted branches of modern philosophy. 

connection with iv ; We saw that the doctrinal dualism of early 
Mediaeval Dual- Christianity and of the middle age was only a 
lsm * materialised expression for a conviction which never 
exactly coincided with it. It would be ridiculous to say that 
such men as Dante, or Francis of Assisi believed the world of 
spiritual realities to lie far away beyond the grave. But it is 
true that they were unable to satisfy the whole strenuousness 
of their own and still more, probably, of the popular convic- 
tion, without insisting on the antagonism between flesh and 
spirit under the image of a temporal and spatial separation. 
And again the image had a double tendency. It addressed 
itself then, as always, not merely to the aspiration after a 
region of divine reasonableness, but to that after a complete 
satisfaction to individual romantic sentiment. 

When therefore free thought set about the task of re-con- 
quering the universe for feeling and intellect, this material 
separation, which had never represented the actual dividing 
line between reason and sense, nor determined which of these 
factors belong to "this" world and which to the "other," 
bequeathed to philosophy rather the habit or form of such an 
absolute antithesis as that between a " here " and a " beyond," 
than any particular distribution of content between the two 
sides of such an antithesis. It is true that the ideas of 
Freedom, God and Immortality continued to stand over 

1 Treatise of Human Nature, vol. ii. (Green and Grose), p. 151. See 
below, p. 179. 



REASON AND FEELING. 



175 



against such notions as those of necessity, nature, and the 
dependence of mind on body. But it would not be possible 
to identify the intellectualist school of thought as the heir of 
the former or supernatural point of view, and the sensation- 
alist or " empirical" as the heir of the latter or merely natural 
point of view ; for in fact the antagonism of freedom and 
necessity, purpose and mechanism, mind and body, is repre- 
sented with startling distinctness within the philosophic move- 
ment from Descartes, through Spinoza and Leibnitz, to Wolff 
and his successors; while the English and later French thinkers, 
who start from the "here" and "now" of sensation and desire, 
begin by transmuting it into a system of scientific and therefore 
ideal necessity, against which individual feeling, having learned 
its own importance from being treated as a primary datum 
and standard, asserts itself for example in Rousseau with a 
claim for freedom and satisfaction both here and hereafter. 

Thus either reason or feeling may seize upon the place of 
the supernatural, and either of them, again, may be interpreted 
into a purely natural system. Either of these, so long as they 
remain purely abstract opposites, may be regarded as freedom 
when identified with the willing self, and must turn out to be 
mere necessity when found to exclude an element that the self 
seems in concrete experience to contain. It is not easy to 
decide whether one would rather be a being without affections, 
as Spinoza, it appears, would represent man at his best, or the 
defenceless prey of successive solicitations of appetite accord- 
ing to the strictest interpretation of Hume. What is really 
gained by the pre-Kantian treatment of these antagonisms is 
a gradually growing demonstration, owing to the manner in 
which they dissolve into one another, that their cause must 
be somewhere in the nature of mind. 

„ ^ „ TJ . v. The observations upon beauty thrown out 

Esthetic Ideas 111 , , ., , , . \ ^ t ^ 

pre-Kantian by philosophers whether in England, r ranee, or 
Philosophy, Germany, before Kant, do not possess the note of 
progressive modern aesthetic, and are not the true progenitors of 
that study. For, as we have partly seen, and shall further see 
when we come to deal with Kant, it draws its peculiar import 
from the fact that it constitutes an essential and almost 
primary element in the treatment by which Kant attempted 
to reconcile the conflicting philosophical movements that con- 
verged upon him ; and it would be false history to represent 
as springing from certain external symptoms of these move- 



176 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



merits the problem which really sprang from the whole 
system of forces to which they belonged. Kant no doubt 
borrowed from his predecessors in philosophy both the name 
of aesthetic and certain features of its treatment ; but the need 
of it lay deeper in his thought than any suggestions of theirs, 
and the material which was destined after Kant's time to meet 
this need more fully was being stored up elsewhere than in 
abstract metaphysic. 

We must therefore regard pre-Kantian aesthetic, so far as 
it exists at all in the great philosophers, not as the generating 
cause of its later development, but only as an external attri- 
bute of the movement which was really such a cause. It is 
not necessary to treat it in great detail. 

The pioneers of free thought do not give much attention 
to the phenomena of the beautiful. Descartes and Spinoza, 
Bacon, Hobbes and Locke, throw themselves at once into 
what seem the most urgent and central issues of man's 
position in the world — into questions relating to human free- 
dom, the nature of God, the extension of knowledge, the 
nature of the mind and of society. And in some degree the 
severe rationalism of these philosophers, whether its root be 
intellectualist or sensationalist, implies an attitude towards 
fine art that reminds us not a little of Plato. But yet in 
substance their ideas are far more favourable to its importance 
than are those of antiquity, for they stand on the firm found- 
ation slowly laid by the Christian consciousness in all the 
popular developments of the argument from design ; which 
is equivalent to saying, that even if they doubt the teleology 
of the world, they do not doubt its being rational and access- 
ible to intelligence through and through. Now on the basis 
of this conviction, upon which the modern mind is firmly 
established, the due consideration of beauty and knowledge 
is a mere question of time ; it is only natural that reason 
should first consciously appreciate itself in its more plainly 
and directly intellectual expression. 

It is noticeable from this point of view that Descartes 
(1596-1650) wrote a "Compendium Musicae " — music, it 
must be remembered, formed part of the educational " quadri- 
vium " of the middle age along with arithmetic, geometry and 
astronomy, under the name of a science — and though Spinoza 
(1632-1677) seems to have recognised no meaning at all in 



i 



SHAFTESBURY. 



177 



the term beauty, 1 which for him could only designate a con- 
fused form of intelligence, yet we find in — 

(a) Leibnitz (1646-17 1 6), an expression echoing 

Leibnitz. ^.Z -. .. i*i •• i 

mediaeval associations, while containing the germ 
of many later researches into the power of sound ; 2 " Musica 
est arithmetica nescientis se numerare animi," 3 "music is 
counting performed by the mind without knowing that it is 
counting," or, translating negative into positive terms in con- 
formity with Leibnitz's system, " music is a felt relation of 
number." This, however in need of further explanation, is 
a plain case of "reason in the form of feeling," and so more 
generally Leibnitz falls back on the aesthetic point of view 
of Augustine by comparing the permission of evil in the 
universe to the introduction of ugly colour or discordant 
sound by an artist, enhancing the beauty of his work as a 
whole. This, of course, involves the assumption that what 
is beautiful to feeling is ultimately an expression of harmony, 
though capable of including apparent contradiction. 

The above is enough to indicate in general the starting- 

o o o 

point of modern philosophy, so far as it affects the place of 
beauty in the system of things ; it is separated from classical 
antiquity by that whole interval of a new faith which separates 
Augustine or Erigena from Plato, but it is also inspired with 
its own freely analytic and progressive impulse. 

(b) Shaftesbury (1 670-1 713) stands, so far as aesthetic is 
concerned, on the same metaphysical ground of the Christian 
intelligence, believing beauty to be an expression of the 
divine life of the world, which he contrasts with dead matter 
in a way too much akin to Plotinus, and is therefore unable 
to find an explanation for ugliness or evil. He sees, however, 
that the true purpose of art is to bring before the mind ideas 
and sentiments in shapes drawn from sense-perception, the 
trained eye and ear being ultimate judges of what is beautiful 
or not. His extension of the terms "beauty" and "sense" 
to the goodness of morality and the faculty by which we 
judge of it, is fatal of course to a distinct demarcation of the 
aesthetic region. But vet, bv insisting on the education of 

1 Erdmann, E. Tr., ii. 85. 

2 We shall notice later the effect on aesthetic of the rise of musical art. 
Between Descartes'* birth and Leibnitz's death, Opera sprang up in Paris, 
Italy, Germany and England. 

3 See Lotze, G. d. A., 275. 



'73 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



the art-sense, and by his detailed attention to the phenomena 
of art, he marks a stage in the growing tendency to appre- 
ciate beautiful production as in its own right an important 
activity of human life, and an important element in history. 
His criticisms on the limits of time over which an action, 
represented in painting, may extend, anticipates some of the 
discussions in Lessing's Laocoon. 

So far as we can judge, the content of reason which beauty 
embodies for sense did not signify for Shaftesbury anything 
more than the formal principle of antiquity — the principle of 
unity in multiplicity. The advance lies in the complete and 
confident identification of beauty with the aspect presented 
by art and nature to trained perception. It is easy to speak 
of Shaftesbury as a Platonist ; but we must remember that in 
place of a fierce anti-sensuous dualism, only indicating at times 
the identification of fact and reason, and for the most part 
hostile to art, we have now an easy-going pantheistic monism, 
almost identifying God, reason, and ordinary material Nature, 
and taking the charm of visible things as an obvious outcome 
of the divine principle. It is the world that has moved 
on, and that has verified the highest of Plato's suggestions ; 
Shaftesbury is far from being a great philosopher, and does 
little but reproduce, in terms of the individual's sensibility, 
the current ideas of his age. 

Hume W ^ * s wort h while, before leaving the 

British philosophers, to notice the observations 
upon beauty made in passing by David Hume (1711-1776) 
in the Ti^eatise of Human Nahtre, published in 1738. I 
should hardly have thought it fair to lay stress upon them, 
being fragmentary, and contained in a youthful work, were it 
not that they are in fact of considerable value. 

"If 1 we consider all the hypotheses which have been formed 
either by philosophy or common reason, to explain the differ- 
ence betwixt beauty and deformity, we shall find that all of 
them resolve into this, that beauty is such an order and con- 
struction of parts, as either by the primary constitution of our 
nature, by custom, or by caprice, is fitted to give a pleasure 
and satisfaction to the soul. This is the distinguishing charac- 
ter of beauty, and forms all the difference betwixt it and 
deformity, whose natural tendency is to produce uneasiness. 



Treatise of Human Nature. Green and Grose. Vol. ii., p. 95. 



BEAUTY REFERRED TO SYMPATHY. 



179 



Pain and pleasure, therefore, are not only necessary attendants 
of beauty and deformity, but constitute their very essence." 
" — Beauty, like wit, cannot be defined, but is discerned 
only by a taste or sensation." The greater part of the plea- 
sure of beauty arises, however, from the idea of convenience 
or utility. Now the point which seems deserving of atten- 
tion, is the precise mode of connection between this idea of 
utility and the sensation of beauty. For Hume lays down 
with absolute clearness that beauty, as a rule, arises from a 
utility which does not at all concern the spectator whose sense 
of beauty is awakened, but only the owner or person imme- 
diately affected by the real properties of the object. It is 
therefore only by sympathy that the feeling of beauty can 
exist for the spectator. A curious example is as follows : 1 — - 
" I know not but a plain, overgrown with furze and broom, 
may be, in itself, as beautiful as a hill covered with vines or 
olive-trees ; though it will never appear so to one who is 
acquainted with the value of each. But this is a beauty merely 
of imagination, and has no foundation in what appears to the 
senses." 

This example seems to indicate a concession to what might 
be called the vulgar doctrine of utility, because monetary value 
does not imply high structural organisation. But we must 
not fail to notice in it the pregnant distinction between beauty 
of imagination — what would now be called beautv of rela- 
tion — and beauty for the sense, or beauty of form. If we ask 
lor the nature and grounds of the latter, I think we must sup- 
pose that Hume resolves it into a more obvious case of the 
relation of utility — a case in which utility is plainly expressed 
in the physical form of the object. And here again, the plea- 
sure or pain upon which beauty or deformity depend, as in 
the uneasiness produced by an ill-balanced figure in a paint- 
ing, gains its "vivacity" through sympathy alone. 2 I sup- 
pose that his reason for not distinguishing, in the case of a 
work of art, between the spectator and the person really 
affected, is simply that in this case there can be no such per- 
son, and therefore our sympathy can only be with each other's 
ideas, and not with any person's actual advantage or injury. 

Whatever we may think of the mechanism of impressions 
and ideas as described by Hume, it is plain that his doctrine of 



1 IK P- 151. 



2 P. 1 5 2 - 



i8o 



HISTORY OF ^ESTHETIC. 



utility in beauty does not involve a selfish interest on the part 
of the spectator, and that it practically implies a distinction in 
natural beauty as well as in art between aesthetic semblance 
and real effect ; and further, that his idea of an aesthetic 
generalisation of pleasure and pain through sympathy is strik- 
ingly parallel to Aristotle's idea of an artistic generalisation 
of fear through pity. We thus get an approximate anticipa- 
tion of Kant's "form of teleology without the idea of an end," 
and also of his "disinterested pleasure." It is so easy to be 
unjust to any one who mentions the term utility in connection 
with beauty, as Socrates too did, that these observations 
seemed to me to be necessary. And moreover, we have in 
Hume more distinctly than in Shaftesbury, and far more 
plainly than in Hutcheson, the important conception of a taste 
or sensation which though a mere feeling is affected with 
pleasure and pain by structural forms and relations of a defi- 
nite character, analysable by reflection, though not analysed 
by the appreciating sensibility itself. Such an attempt to 
trace the content of beauty is not to be set down as the mere 
abstract identification of it with pleasure-producing quality. 
Nature of tue (d) It is of course a twice-told tale that the 
Advance. individualistic thinkers of Britain from Bacon to 
Hume, in the sphere of metaphysic or general philosophy, 
drove a destructive analysis deeper and deeper into know- 
ledge until with Hume the last word of sensational empiricism 
was spoken. But it is a total misconception to apply the 
principle of this progression to the province of positive aesthe- 
tic research, which did not at that time form a central issue in 
metaphysical philosophy. And thus when we are told 1 that 
British aesthetic passed from Platonism (in Shaftesbury) to 
Aristotelianism (in Lord Kaimes) and subsequently ran into 
materialistic empiricism of the shallowest kind in Burke and 
Hogarth — Reynolds being omitted — we feel that the great 
formulae of historical philosophy have in this case hardly been 
grasped with the thoroughness which is needed for their con- 
crete application. The age in question was an age of reflec- 
tion, of antagonistic abstractions, of the meeting of extremes ; 
all this is quite true. But if we are going to interpret history 
by such a conception, we must not pick out a thinker here 
and a critic there, and throw them into a succession according 



1 Schasler, i. 313. 



THE REAL COURSE OF REFLECTION. 



181 



to their intellectual characters, quite apart from their special 
forms of preoccupation with the problems of the age. We 
must realise that the reflective character of the time, like all 
such dominant tendencies, was no mere intellectual instinct 
of certain writers in philosophy and literature, but was dic- 
tated by the whole existing situation of facts and forces, which 
placed the individual subject in presence of a set of completed 
systems, antiquity, mediaeval art, theology, political authority, 
by overcoming which and reasserting itself in spite of them 
it had to win a new positive freedom and positive content. 
Now if we compare one of these forms of conquest with 
another — even though the same thinker is engaged in both, 
as may well happen — we construct a transition and imagine a 
tendency which is altogether unreal. As the English passed, 
in aesthetic, from Platonism to Aristotelianism, so the French 
passed, we are told, 1 from Aristotelianism (in Batteux) to 
Platonism (in Cousin), and thus the necessity by which one- 
sided abstractions work out their opposites is supposed to be 
exemplified. 

All this is utterly unhistorical. Sidney, Corneille, Shaftes- 
bury as an art critic, Lord Kaimes, Batteux, Lessing, were all 
interested not in the issues of metaphysic, but in the adjust- 
ment of modern aesthetic feeling, always comparatively speak- 
ing somewhat romantic, to the classical tradition, represented 
at first by conventional conceptions of Aristotle and of Greek 
beauty, and then, as criticism deepened, by something nearer 
the real Aristotle and real Greek art and poetry. Within 
this domain of criticism the work of reflection took the form, 
prescribed for it by circumstances, of struggling with the 
given antithesis which w r as the primary fact of the situation, 
and as reflection gradually broke through the rind of tradition, 
its results became more and more empirical in the sense of 
being more vital, more concrete, more akin to the true philo- 
sophical speculation which was to arise from its endeavours. 
It is a wild confusion to identify the appeal to aesthetic fact 
in Hogarth, Burke and Reynolds, under the ambiguous name 
empiricism, with the increasingly severe and abstract analysis 
of general experience which culminated in the metaphysic of 
David Hume. The one made content richer, as we have 
seen in the aesthetic suggestions of Hume himself ; the other 



1 Schasler, I.e. 



182 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



made it poorer for the moment, and only richer in a construc- 
tive sense, by helping to prepare the place which a fuller con- 
tent would one day occupy. The two movements together 
were therefore, as we have urged throughout, pioneering the 
junction which followed in and after Kant. 

I may add that in order to gain probability for the perverse 
view which has been indicated, Schasler omits Sidney at 
the beginning of the English development, and adds on 
Cousin, who belongs to a wholly different age, at the end 
of the French. The "critical" movement, in the sense de- 
fined at the beginning of the present chapter, is in England 
from Sidney to Burke and Hogarth, in France from Corneille 
to Rousseau and Diderot, in Germany from Gottsched and 
Ramler to Schiller and Goethe. If the true nature of this 
movement had been understood, the attempt would not have 
been made to display an antithetical progression by simply 
passing in the account of English thought from a metaphysical 
to a critical writer, and in that of French thought from a 
critical to a metaphysical one. 

The movement of eighteenth-century metaphysic in France 
needs no separate treatment. The operative forces that 
framed the problem for Kant are adequately represented 
within the region of philosophy, by the British school on the 
one hand, and the Wolffian, containing in it many elements 
of French (Cartesian) origin, on the other. 
Baumgarten ^ th e British school, starting from what is 

most individual in the individual, worked upwards 
to aesthetic ideas from observing the trained artistic sense, or 
from analysing the conditions of disinterested pleasure, the 
Cartesian school, continuous for our purposes with the Leib- 
nitzian, worked downward to aesthetic ideas by ultimately 
attempting to extend its intellectualist theory, which dealt 
primarily with knowledge, to the phenomena of feeling and 
perception. And the extension thus initiated by Baumgarten 
(1714-1762) under the name " yEsthetica," was so far cha- 
racteristically concerned about the theory of beauty as to hand 
down the term ^Esthetic as the accepted title for the philo- 
sophy of the beautiful. 

The genesis of his conception appears to have been as 
follows. Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, and Wolff, form as 
intellectualist philosophers an unbroken sequence, in spite of 
Leibnitz's revolt against the abstract unity of Spinoza's " sub- 



CLEAR AND CONFUSED. 



stance." Throughout this whole succession the passions and 
sense-perceptions are described in terms of the abstract in- 
telligence, and therefore negatively, that is to say, by the 
attribute in which they differ from an abstract idea. Both 
sense-perception and passion are, according to Spinoza, "con- 
fused acts of thought," 1 and in Wolff's psychology there is 
a complete set of faculties belonging to the " obscure" portion 
of knowledge, and corresponding to the faculties of the dis- 
tinct intellect. Xow clear thinking was treated by Wolff in 
the science or method of Logic, both theoretical and practical, 
as an introduction to theoretical philosophy or metaphysic 
with its four parts, Ontology, Cosmology, Ethics, and Psycho- 
logy. It occurs then to Baumgarten, who in every wav 

O J O d J 

continues to push the survey of science into detail — he wrote 
a Sketch of Philosophical Encyclopedia a term inherited by 
German philosophy from late Greek and mediaeval educa- 
tion — to prefix to the Wolffian logic, or method of clear 
knowledge, a still prior science or method of sensible or 
obscure knowledge, to be called ^Esthetic. Such a prelimin- 
ary science might, it has been observed, 2 have taken the form 
of inductive logic, or it might be added, as in Kant, of an 
enquiry into the nature of the forms of sense. But Baum- 
garten is thoroughly consistent. Inductive logic and the 
theory of space and time both belong to the doctrine of clear 
knowledge — such a doctrine as that of modern logical text- 
books where they deal with "the extraction of general pro- 
positions from sense-perception." But the subject of the 
/Esthetica is "obscure conception" qua obscure, that is 
knowledge in the form of feeling and remaining in that form. 
To us, no doubt, sense-perception is apt to seem the clearest 
of data, and we hardly see the force of a distinction which 
ranks it as " confused." 

I imagine that what is meant bv clear and confused through 
this whole succession of philosophies may be illustrated by 
the possibility of adequately expressing this or that matter in 
words. 3 I suppose that a clear idea is one which is so cut 
down and defined as to be communicable by a conventional 
sign with a 'tolerable degree of adequacy, while a confused 



1 Erdmann, E. Tr., ii. 85. 

2 Zimmermann, i. 169. 

3 See, e.g., Erdmann on Leibnitz and Descartes, ii. 1S2. 



184 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



idea is one which remains of a kind and complexity — such as 
a harmony of colour — which language cannot reproduce. 
That the "confused idea" can have an order of its own, 
which is appreciable to feeling, seems to be presupposed in 
the idea of beauty, and insisted on by Baumgarten in his dis- 
cussion. 

The sphere of aesthetic, then, is a whole complex of faculties, 
those which represent any connection in a confused form, 1 and 
which, taken together form the "analogon rationis," the parallel 
or parody of reason in the province of confused knowledge. 
Thus it is clearly more akin to the subject of psychology than 
to that of logic or elementary metaphysic, and appears to me 
to be a conception to which modern psychology, constantly 
finding parallels to logical processes in unconscious or sub- 
conscious mental movements, is bringing us back. But again 
it was not quite from this point of view, not as a parallel in 
the form of feeling to logical processes, that the region of 
obscure ideas pressed itself on Baumgarten's attention. Such 
a treatment would still make the excellence of sensuous per- 
ception consist in a form of truth — which can only exist in 
so far as the perception is after all interpreted into a judg- 
ment, a feeling that "something is so or so." Baumgarten 
maintained his distinction more thoroughly than this, and 
with a coherence for which he hardly receives due commen- 
dation. He gives to the perfection of sensuous knowledge, 
i.e., of feeling or sensation, the name of beauty, as the mani- 
festation in feeling— so 1 understand the accounts of him — 
of that attribute which when manifested in intellectual know- 
ledge is called truth. Only it is difficult to see how he could 
call aesthetic thus construed the art of beautiful thinking 
(pulchre cogitandi), 2 for thinking always conveys to us the idea 
of an intellectual process. 

His analysis of the content of this perfection is not adequate 
to his conviction as to the source from which it is to be 
drawn. In the former he does not advance beyond the 
theories of antiquity ; in the latter he shares the consciousness 
of his age, though hidden under a phraseology that recalls the 
old attitude of Plato. In every way therefore he is on the 
threshold of a new movement. 

The idea of perfection had played a great part in the 



1 Zimmermann, A., i. 165. 



2 Erdmann, ii. 240. 



PERFECTION AND IMITATION. 



185 



speculation of Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibnitz, and was 
directly transmitted from Wolff to Baumgarten. It might be 
generally defined as the character of a whole in so far as this 
whole is affirmed by its parts without counter-action, and thus 
perfection became a postulate of everything real, because 
reality depended upon power to harmonise with the greatest 
number of conditions. In Wolff, therefore, it naturally comes 
to mean the mere logical relation of the whole to part, or 
unity in variety, and this is the sense in which Baumgarten 
also employs it. The content of beauty for him is therefore 
nothing more than our old friend the formal principle of unity 
in variety which may, of course, at any moment take the form 
of teleology. Whatever is opposed to the perfection of 
sensuous knowledge, that is to the unity of parts in the whole 
of the sense-perception, is ugly. 

But from the same tradition which gave him the abstract idea 
of perfection, he derives a peculiar conviction as to the source 
from which alone such perfection can enter the region of feel- 
ing. It must be observed that in speaking of perfection 
of sensation, when we might speak of sensitive appreciation 
of perfection, he is perfectly in his right. The character of 
the perceptive content as such and in itself is what concerns 
aesthetic, just as the character of knowledge as such and in 
itself is w T hat concerns logic. The distinction of subject and 
object concerns metaphysics, but not logic nor aesthetic. 

The greatest degree of perfection was to be found, accord- 
ing to Leibnitz, in the existing universe, every other possible 
system being as a whole less perfect. Baumgarten, in- 
heriting this view, which is really a translation into philosophy 
of the Christian teleological consciousness, makes nature, the 
world accessible to sense-perception, the standard and pattern 
of art. This raises in a quaint form the whole problem of 
the fantastic imagination. The poetical world of fable and 
mythology possesses only " heterocosmic " 1 truth, and there- 
fore has a less degree of perfection and of beauty than the 
actual world of experience. The introduction of the heathen 
deities in modern poetry appears to him therefore thoroughly 
erroneous. Imitation of nature is the law of art. 

The fundamental connection of his views, in spite of their 
verbal coincidence with the doctrine of antiquity, is altogether 



" Belonging to another world. 



i86 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



modern. The nature which is to be imitated is for him the 
revelation of perfection, not as in Plato a secondary and 
inferior world ; and to reproduce it is a high but possible task, 
not an idle indulgence and a vain endeavour. The hiatus 
is between the formal principle of perfection, i.e. unity in 
variety, and the immense and individual splendour of the 
v/orld, which that abstract principle is whoHy inadequate to 
comprehend. A deeper analysis was needed to exhibit this 
concrete content as a development of that abstract principle. 

In many respects the attitude of later German philosophy 
towards aesthetic was anticipated, perhaps influenced, by Baum- 
garten. The feeling that art was a sort of preparatory discipline 
to speculative knowledge, and the doubt whether the two could 
thoroughly co-exist, seems to reproduce itself in Schiller and 
in Hegel, although they rejected the still more decided intel- 
lectualist prejudice which makes Baumgarten apologise for 
his subject as something below the dignity of philosophy, but 
after all interesting to the philosopher as a man among men. 1 
Again, the idea of beauty as felt perfection lends itself of 
course readily to Kant's conception of teleology without the 
distinct notion of an end, although the other important 
Kantian distinction between the beautiful and the object of 
desire, does not appear to have been made by Baumgarten 
otherwise than through the general leaning to knowledge 
more than pleasure as the central characteristic of beauty. 
But all perfection gives pleasure and causes desire, and 
beauty is a kind of perfection. The desire for the real object 
suggested in art, and the interest in the beautiful as beauti- 
ful, are perhaps not distinguished by him, as they are not 
with absolute clearness by Kant. Apart from this one point 
of obscurity the definite demarcation of aesthetic from logic 
and ethics was in itself a considerable service to philosophy ; 
and the bias which its author showed against the " unnatural " 
or "fictitious" started the enquiry into the ideal on the whole 
in a right direction ; 2 only a certain weakness which Baum- 
garten had for allegory, as fiction in the service of truth, 
perhaps affected Winckelmann or at least was shared by him. 

It seems needless to discuss the views of other philosophers 
between Baumgarten and Kant, such as Mendelssohn. What 



1 Zimmermann, i., 159. Hegel, y£sth., Introd. E. Tr., p. 8. 

2 See for the solution Modem Painters, iii. 131. 



STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM. 



187 



is essential in the culture of the later eighteenth century 
belongs rather to the critical than to the speculative move- 
ment, and will be indicated in the next chapter. Kant took 
up the problem of general philosophy on its German side 
directly from Baumgarten, from whose compendia he was at 
first in the habit of lecturing. 1 When Hume and Baumgarten 
had written the array of strictly philosophical forces was com- 
plete. The suggestions made on points of aesthetic by them 
and other writers, although no doubt they furnished Kant 
with the technical term Esthetic, and perhaps with some of 
his detailed ideas, were not the principal factors in the 
question that urged itself upon him. The question was, I 
repeat, in its general form, " How can the sensuous and the 
ideal world be reconciled ? " and in its special aesthetic form, 
" How can a pleasurable feeling partake of the character of 
reason ? " 

It was the former question which gave, for Kant, its full 
import to the latter ; and it was the concrete solution of the 
latter, following upon Kant's statement which was in itself 
half an answer, that paved the way for a new and more 
fertile treatment of the former. 



1 Erdmann, ii. 238. 



CHAPTER IX. 



THE DATA OF MODERN ESTHETIC PHILOSOPHY. 

In the beginning of the last chapter we distinguished the 
processes which paved the way for modern aesthetic speculation 
into the formulation of the problem by philosophy, and the 
preparation of the data by criticism. This latter process 
forms the subject of the present chapter. 

Criticism in the widest sense includes, as we saw, the 
work of classical scholarship or philology, of archaeology, and 
of art-criticism or the appreciation of beautiful things as 
beautiful. Each of these movements represents in its own 
form that antithesis which is inherent in the position of the 
modern world as coming after the ancient, and which distin- 
guishes its whole basis of thought and feeling, as historical 
and reflective, from the direct naturalism of antiquity. It is 
not necessary for our purpose to write a complete account of 
classical philology or of archaeology from the Renaissance to 
the eighteenth century. Such an account of either as the 
late Mr. Mark Pattison might have written would be of the 
utmost value for the comprehension of modern philosophy, 
but would demand a knowledge such as few but he have 
possessed, and would considerably exceed in compass the 
whole of the present work. 

classical i • I will simply recall two great moments in the 
Philology, history of philology which have been indicated by 
the writer to whom I have just referred. 

i. In the year i sS ^ loseph Scaligfer 1 published 

JossdIl Scalisroi* . 

his De Emendatione Temporum, the first attempt 
to apply modern astronomical knowledge "to get a scientific 
basis for historical chronology." This attempt led up to the 
Thesaurus Temporum (1606), "in which 2 every chronological 
relic extant in Greek or Latin was reproduced, placed in order, 
restored, and made intelligible." 



1 Mark Pattison's Essays, I. 162. 

188 



2 Ik, 162. 



PHILOLOGY. 



This great work involved nothing less than the conception 
of Universal History, breaking down the barrier, then con- 
sidered absolute, between the classical and the biblical world, 
and including in the problem of historical research the extra- 
classical world also. The importance of this achievement for 
us is not so much in the active effect of its great idea — for, it 
appears, this idea remained unfertile through the seventeenth 
and eighteenth centuries — as in the proof which it affords that 
by the beginning of the seventeenth century the remains of 
antiquity were in the possession of the learned world in a degree 
which could suggest the conception of understanding the 
ancient civilisations as a whole. 

f a. wolf 1L J ust a ^ out two nun dred years later, 1 in 1786, 
F. A. Wolf " prevailed on the Chancellor of the 
University (at Halle) to erect a philological seminarium for 
the special training of classical teachers." In the conduct of 
this seminarium 2 Wolf developed his conception of "philology," 
as a student of which — " Studiosus philologise " — he had in- 
sisted upon being set down twenty years before in the matri- 
culation-book at Gottingen, where, as at other universities, no 
such faculty was then recognised. 

Philology, he conceived, was now capable of becoming a 
study in its own right ; the ancient 3 languages were no longer 
the mere introduction to law or theology, nor could they any 
longer be held as the storehouse of all knowledge. The 
purpose of philology was more and less than these. It was 
nothing short of the knowledge of human nature as exhibited 
in antiquity. That is to say, the inheritance of classical learn- 
ing, which had so long appeared as a foreign element, mys- 
terious alike in its value and in its worthlessness, within the 
romantic life of modern Europe, had now been mastered, and 
had become transparent, and was seen to deal with utterances 
of human nature belonging to a development of which we 
also, with our utterances and self-expressions, form a part. 
The Prolegomena to Homer, published in 1795, further and 
most profoundly stimulated thought in this direction, by show- 



1 Id. ib., 363. 

2 A system of classes in which the intending teacher teaches under the eye 
of the inspector — in this case Wolf. For the origin and antiquity of this 
system see Hatch's Hibbert Lectures. He refers to it our term " Prcelector" 

3 Id. ib. 



190 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



ing that " Homer 1 was no single poet, writing according to 
art and rule, but a name which stood for a golden age of the 
true spontaneous poetry of genius and nature." The fixed 
ideas of the eighteenth century had been breaking up before 
this time, and breaking up in this direction. An interest had 
arisen in popular poetry. Ossian and Percy's Reliques had 
stirred the sympathy of German poets and men of letters. 
The whole critical movement, in the narrower sense of art- 
criticism, which we shall consider below, had, from Gottsched 
to Goethe, a tendency of the same kind. More especially, 
British writings translated into German 2 had pointed out the 
" naturalness " of Homer, and the probability that he com- 
posed without the help of writing. Thus when Wolf inaugu- 
rated his profound conception of philology and made clear 
the difference between the natural and the artificial epic, the 
time was obviously ripe for an appreciation of the classical 
writings in their deepest relation to definite phases of life, and 
as objects of such appreciation the works of ancient art and 
poetry became materials for aesthetic philosophy. It is re- 
markable that the dates of Wolfs great achievements fall with- 
in or close upon the fateful decade (i 790-1 800) in which by 
an unparalleled concentration of influences the future form of 
modern aesthetic, and with it of modern objective idealism, 
was in its essence determined. 

_ ' _ 2. The higher spirit of archaeology is the same 

Archeology. . , . r 1 -i i nr if i r i • i 

with that 01 philology as Wolf denned it, and 
indeed he included in the latter science the study and inter- 
pretation of ancient works of formative art. While, on the 
other hand, that part of the work of such a student as Winckel- 
mann, which bears most directly upon our subject, is of a 
semi-philosophical nature, and must be treated under the 
head of art-criticism rather than under that of archaeology. 
In the present section my purpose is only to point out one or 
two tangible facts which appear to me to be significant, con- 
cerning the dates at which important relics of antiquity became 
known to modern inquirers. I have not met with any con- 
spectus of information on this head such as a historian of 
ancient formative art could put together in a few lines, which 
would be, as I imagine, of the utmost interest and value for 
the history of culture. My own knowledge on the subject is 



1 D. B. Monro, art. " Homer," Encycl. Brit. 



2 See id. ib. 



THE LATIN RENAISSANCE. 



far too meagre ; but I give some facts as better than none 
at all. 

Early Discoveries i- It is a curious external illustration of the 
on Italian sou. na t U re which we have ascribed to that classical 
tradition which the Renaissance handed down, that its earlier 
days were occupied with the later works of art. The Apollo 
Belvedere, probably a Roman copy of a fine statue of the 
third century B.C., was discovered about the end of the 
fifteenth century at Antium. The Laocoon, probably an 
original of the Rhodian school of about the second century 
B.C., was found at Rome in 1506, and was known to Michael 
Angelo, who attempted to restore the father's right arm. 
The Belvedere torso of Heracles, by Apollonius in the first 
century B.C., was found at Rome about the same time, and 
was enthusiastically admired both by Michael Angelo and 
by Winckelmann. The group of Dirce, an original of the 
same school as the Laocoon, was found in the Baths of 
Caracalla in 1525. The figures of the Florentine Niobe 
group, a Roman copy of a very fine original of the second 
period of Greek sculpture (of which better partial copies exist 
than the Florentine), were found at Rome in 1583. I do not 
know that before the middle of the seventeenth century any 
modern had seen a work of Greek sculpture executed between 
500 and 400 B.C. Winckelmann, 1 one hundred years later, 
mentions that Montfaucon believed no works of Greek sculp- 
ture to be in existence more ancient than the Roman period. 

This order of discovery is not accidental. It arises from 
the Latin character of the Renaissance, and from the conse- 
quent fact that its direct contact with antiquity was on Italian 
soil, where the greatest works of Hellas, even if some had 
been transported there by purchasers or plunderers, w T ere 
infinitely out-numbered by productions of a later age, and by 
copies freely multiplied, 2 both from earlier and from later 
originals. The diversion of interest towards Greek soil was 
subsequent to this time, and parallel with the deeper inter- 
pretation of the classical tradition. 

Just as we saw to be the case with classical form in litera- 



1 Gesch. d. Kunst des Alterthums, viii. 1. 26. 

2 If we compare a Greco-Roman Caryatid with the British Museum 
Caryatid from the temple of Athene Polias, we shall see the immensity of the 
gulf between different renderings of the same type. 



192 



HISTORY OF .ESTHETIC. 



ture, so too the ancient sculptures were regarded in the fifteenth 
and sixteenth centuries chiefly as models for artists. 1 After 
the sixteenth century a beginning of disinterested study was 
made under the influence of the conception that ancient 
poetry and ancient formative art were especially fitted to 
illustrate one another ; a conception which Lessing is really 
disputing in that part of the " Laocoon " which refers to the 
works of Spence and Caylus. 2 

Early Travels H- It was in the latter half of the seventeenth 
in Greece, century, shortly before the fatal bombardment of 
the Acropolis by Morosini in 1687, 3 that Spon and Wheler pub- 
lished the narratives of their tour in Greece, and that Carrey, 
a French artist, commissioned by the French ambassador to 
the Porte, made those sketches of the Parthenon sculptures 
which are the earliest indications of their state. Morosini 
himself had, it seems, some of the collector's enthusiasm, or 
at least knew the value of the marbles ; and his desire of pos- 
session was no less ruinous than his warlike operations ; for 
not only did a shell dropping into the Turkish powder store 
within the Parthenon blow down the middle part of the build- 
ing, but after the Venetians had occupied the city the work- 
men employed by Morosini to remove the horses of Athene 
from the western pediment let them fall on the rocks of the 
Acropolis, where they were dashed to pieces. Many frag- 
ments of statues were carried off by officers of Morosini's 
force, some of which have since been recovered. 4 Carrey's 
drawings do not seem to have been known to Winckelmann, 
and in fact they would be of little use before the sculptures 
themselves were accessible. 
Hercuianeum iil. A remarkable stimulus to archaeological 
and Pompeii. researc h was given by the accidental discovery 
of antiquities at Hercuianeum in 1709, leading to the com- 
mencement of excavations in 1738, and by similar discoveries 
leading to researches at Pompeii from 1755 onwards. Winck- 
elmann arrived at Rome in this year, and from time to time 



1 Encycl. Brit., art. " Archaeology." 

2 The titles of their works are suggestive : Spence's Poly metis, or, An 
Enquiry co?ice?-ning the Agreement between the Works of the Roman Poets and 
the Remains of the Ancient Artists, 1755, and Caylus' Tableaux tires de 
Vlliade. 

3 Murray's Hist, of Greek Sculpture, ii. 21. 

4 Overbeck, i. 291. 



THE ELGIN MARBLES. 



193 



wrote reports of the Herculanean discoveries, on which part 
of his discussion upon the painting of the ancients is based. 1 

It does not indeed appear that any works of the best time 
were added to the data of aesthetic by the discovery of Her- 
culaneum and Pompeii ; what was gained, in addition to very 
considerable archaeological knowledge, and a large mass of 
characteristic though late Greek art, was rather the sense of 
vitality and completeness in this new contact with antiquity. 
The concentration of aesthetic and partly aesthetic activity in 
England, France, and Germany round the year 1750, in which, 
as we saw, Baumgarten first gave the science its name, is 
exceedingly remarkable, and the Herculanean discoveries 
must take their place among its causes. 2 This interest was 
not confined to the Continent. Among Winckelmann's 
grumblings 3 at the destruction and improper restoration of 
many works of art in recent times, we find the complaint that 
lately and during his stay in Rome many noteworthy objects 
had been carried off to England, " where, as Pliny says, they 
are banished to remote country-houses." In Winckelmann's 
own opinion there was nothing at Rome in his day belonging 
to the high or grand style of Greek sculpture except the 
(Florentine) Niobe group then in the Villa Medicis at Rome, 
and a Pallas " nine palms high " 4 in the Villa Albani. 

Greece iv. From 1 75 1 onwards the activity of English- 
proper. men was di rec ted to making known the monuments 
of Greece proper ; and the labours and publications of many 
explorers 5 between that date and the early years of the present 
century no doubt marked and swelled the rising tide of interest 
which made it possible for Lord Elgin to conceive and carry 
out (in 1812) the idea of securing the Parthenon marbles for 
this country. It was not till about the same time that the pedi- 
ment sculptures from /Egina, and the frieze from Phigaleia, 



1 Gesch. d. Kimst y ~Bk. 7, i. 3. 

2 Gesch. d. Kunst, Einleitung, xiv. 

3 It is fair to point out how the interest helped to create its own material. 
The fact that a prince, seeking crushed marble to make plaster for his new 
villa, was told by some peasants that they knew where there was plenty 
(Prince Elbeuf at Portici in 1709) would not in every period have led to the 
scientific excavation of the buried city. 

4 G. d. K., 8, ii. 4, and see p. 245 below. 

5 Stuart and Revell, and the explorers sent out by the Society of Dilettanti 
(founded 1734), continued to publish drawings and descriptions at intervals 
throughout this period. 

o 



194 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



became known and were brought to Germany and England 
respectively. The later labours of the nineteenth century, with 
their magnificent result, do not concern us as yet. It is of in- 
terest, however, to notice an aspiration of Winckelmann, which 
his countrymen have in late years splendidly fulfilled. " I can- 
not refrain," he writes, 1 "in concluding this chapter, from making 
known a desire which concerns the extension of our know- 
ledge in Greek art, as well as in scholarship and the history 
of that nation. This wish of mine is for a journey to Greece, 
not to places which many have visited, but to Elis, to which 
no scholar nor person skilled in art has yet penetrated. . . . 
What, as regards works of art, is the whole Lacedaemonian 
territory compared with the one town of Pisa in Elis, where 
the Olympic games were celebrated ? I am certain that in 
this place the results would be inconceivably great, and that 
by careful exploration of this soil a great light would dawn 
upon art." 

Hegel, in his aesthetic lectures, which continued down to 
1828, profited by some at least of the discoveries of the early 
nineteenth century. He makes good use 2 of a description of 
the ^Eginetan pediment sculptures, which was published, with 
notes by Schelling, in 181 7. He was acquainted, at least by 
hearsay, with the Elgin marbles, and probably learnt much 
from the works of Hirt 3 and Meyer, 4 both contemporaries of 
Goethe and historians of art. 

Hirt describes in his preface how he had kept pace with 
the advance of archaeological knowledge from the time of his 
paper in 44 Horen " (1797), and how great the harvest of 
material had been during his lifetime, together with the effect 
which in his judgment the extended study of the actual monu- 
ments must necessarily have on aesthetic theory. As the 
passage illustrates the natural development which the idea of 
beauty passed through by the mere deepening and widening 
of experience and appreciation, it will be well to quote it at 
length. 

" No age 5 has ever been more energetic and more fortunate 
than ours in the last fifty years [written 1833] in the discovery 



1 G. d. K., 8, iii. 20. 

2 Hegel's sEsth., ii. 382 and 458. 

3 Geschichte d. Bilde?iden Kunste bei den Altai, 1833. 

4 Same title, 1824-36. 

5 Hirt., Gesch., etc., Preface. 



HIRT S LIFETIME. 



195 



and increase of materials and in the establishment of great 
collections for the benefit of students. 

Egypt, with the neighbouring countries and the Upper 
Nile, have been opened up ; so have Babylonia, Persia, Syria, 
and Asia Minor. Greece has been repeatedly explored, and 
its most important sculptures have passed into European 
museums. Zeal for the discovery of Italian antiquities has 
been augmented on all hands. Not merely the tombs of 
Sicily and Magna Grsecia have surrendered their spoil, but 
so has the long mysterious Etruria. Then think of the 
metopes of Selinus, and of the most recent excavations of 
rare sculptures at Olympia [by the French expedition]. The 
excavations of the buried cities at Vesuvius continue to be 
fertile, together with the inexhaustible mines of Rome and the 
vicinity. Even more distant regions, such as the coasts of 
the Black Sea, France, Spain and Germany, have contributed 
to the mass of material ... So [owing to Hirt's studies in 
Rome] I came into conflict with my predecessors Winckel- 
mann and Lessing, as with my contemporaries Herder and 
Goethe. Objective beauty was assumed to be the principle 
of ancient art. I, on the contrary, pointed to the monuments, 
and showed by ocular demonstration that these monuments 
displayed all forms, the commonest and even the ugliest, 
as also the most beautiful, while the representation of the 
expression always corresponded to the character and the 
motives. Consequently, I maintained that the principle of 
ancient art was not the objectively beautiful and the soften- 
ing (Milderung) of expression, but simply and solely the 
individually significant, or characteristic, 1 whether it dealt 
with the ideal representation of gods and heroes, or any 
mean or common object." 

Hirt considered the characterisation of the centaurs in the 
Parthenon metopes very weak compared with that in later 
representations of the same subject. On the other hand, he 
would not believe that the Parthenon pediment sculptures 
were of the fifth century; he placed them, owing to their great 
tenderness (" Weichheit ") of treatment, in the fourth century, 
which appeared to him to be the time of highest achievement 
in Greek sculpture. This curious perversity of judgment, as 



1 Hirt is supposed to have been the "Characteristiker" of Goethe's Samm- 
ler u. die Seviigen. 



196 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



it appears to us, arose very naturally from Hirt's intermediate 
theoretical position, which was in itself untenable, although 
an advance on his predecessors. For, accepting with Winck- 
elmann and others the antithesis between beauty and ex- 
pression, Hirt found the essence of art not in beauty, but in 
expression, which, by this antithesis, is narrowed down to 
mean the manifestation of something quite definite in the way 
of individuality or action or emotion. Expressiveness of 
this kind is of course to be found in the later art much more 
decidedly than in that of the Periclean age ; and as it did not 
occur to Hirt to analyse " objective beauty " in terms of ex- 
pressiveness, he was obliged by his theory to prefer, as art, 
the monuments which really show a beginning of decadence, 
and to separate from their true context and refer to this later 
time those productions of the greatest age, in which the 
expressive force latent within their ''objective beauty" partly 
breaks through its severe self-restraint. As suggesting a con- 
trast to the idea of beauty, however, and forcing it out of its 
abstraction, his theories and observations were of the very 
greatest value, and like the romantic rebellion of the Schlegels 
and others between 1780 and 1800, really represented in the 
world of ideas that actual growth of material which I have 
been attempting to describe. 

It should be observed that previously to this more extended 
knowledge of ancient sculpture and building a very great 
part had been played in archaeology by coins and gems, which 
are more readily brought together in collections than larger 
plastic works. Such a collection was that of Baron v. Stosch 
at Florence, which Winckelmann spent nine months in cata- 
loguing. The evidence discussed in Lessing's beautiful little 
treatise, How the Ancients Portrayed Death, consisted largely 
of gems. It is well known that gem-cutting (by a curious 
analogy with epigram-writing *) was not very active during the 
great fifth century at Athens, so that here again we see a 
reason why archaeological interest began with the later time of 
art, and worked back to the earlier. 

Enough has been said, I hope, to indicate the sort of pro- 
gress made in the collection of archaeological material between 
the Renaissance and the time of Kant, and the sort of stimu- 
lus which increased knowledge imparted to the theory of art. 



See above, p. 86. 



ART- CRITICISM. 



197 



We have now to say something about the course of literary 
art-criticism in the same period. 

2. Art-criticism must for this purpose include 

Art-criticism. , -, . , . . 1 • r 

on the one hand the appreciative history 01 art, 
and on the other those reflections upon questions concerning 
beauty, which are not guided by a general speculative interest. 
Practically, as was observed above, we can only draw the line 
between this abstract criticism and philosophy proper by ex- 
cluding from the present section the views of writers who 
are known in philosophy otherwise than by their reflections on 
beauty. 

i. We saw that Sidney's criticism and the 

Pierre Corneille. , J 

structure or bhakespeare s plays bears witness to 
an influence derived ultimately from classical tradition, re- 
acting against the formlessness of the earlier drama inherited 
from the middle age. In the reaction of the French seven- 
teenth-century theatre against Spanish influence we see a 
parallel phenomenon, but with less happy issues. This re- 
action, initiated by Malherbe, reached its first culmination in 
the later plays, and in the dramatic theory, of Pierre Corneille 
(1606- 1 684). It is chiefly with his theories that we are 
concerned. 

Towards the close of his life, after fifty years of w T ork for 
the stage, 1 he wrote three essays on the drama : De FutiliM 
et des parties du poeme dramatique, De la Tragddie and Des 
trois unites, the purpose of which may be fairly stated 
in the words of the latter, " accorder les regies anciennes 
avec les agrements modernes," an expression closely analogous 
to that in which Lessing's biographer states the purpose of 
the Dramaturgie 1 " to reconcile the idea of romantic poetry 
with the classical conception of beauty." To Corneille, how- 
ever, the rules came as a prescription of indubitable authority, 
and he scarcely knew that the modifications which he made 
in applying them were really the first steps to reasoning on 
their merits. " II faut, s'il se peut, nous accommoder avec 
elles (les regies) et les amener jusqu'a nous." 3 The inter- 
preters of Aristotle and Horace have been, he goes on to 
say, scholars without experience of the theatre, and have 



1 Discours de Futilite, etc. 

2 Lessing's Leben, Danzel, ii. 193. 

3 Discours de Futilite, etc. 



198 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



therefore thrown little light on their real meaning. He in- 
tends to interpret according to his experience of the stage. 

The similarity between the atmosphere of Corneille's 
thought and that of Lessing's reflections, which are so often 
directed against him, can escape no one who has read 
the Discours and the Dramaturgie. Both are intent on 
building up a national drama from the foundations. Both 
were convinced that a just understanding of Aristotle's rules 
was the way to set about it. Thoughts and expressions from 
Corneille recur in Lessing. Lessing's scholarship indeed is 
to Corneille's as an Armstrong gun to a bow and arrow ; 
and in place of the latter's complacent reference almost ex- 
clusively to his own plays, Lessing has at command the 
whole range of ancient and modern drama. Corneille accepts 
what he takes for Aristotelian dicta as a basis on which, out 
of his own experience, he tries to enlarge. Lessing contends 
that his adherence to the supposed dicta is at least valueless, 
while the supposed enlargements show a real failure to 
appreciate the depth of Aristotle's conceptions. 

And, no doubt, when Corneille explains the famous " puri- 
fication " passage in the Poetics to mean that by the pity and 
fear which tragedy excites we are led to avoid the passions 
which led to the misfortunes of the characters represented, 1 or 
when he denies that Aristotle conceived of pity and fear as 
necessarily interwoven in the same cause of emotion, suggest- 
ing that it would do quite well to have the fear without the 
pity, he falls an easy victim to Lessing's triumphant criticism. 2 
But after all, they were two of a trade ; and in some respects 
a reader of to-clay cannot but feel that Corneille's difficulties 
were too summarily disposed of by Lessing, who would never 
admit that a case could have been omitted by Aristotle. 

We saw, 3 for example, in treating of the Poetics, that 
Aristotle refuses to face the full shock of a tragic collision ; 
he will not allow that a thoroughly good man's ruin can be a 
fitting subject for tragedy. Corneille attacks this limitation, 
as also that which excludes a thoroughly bad man from being 
the object of tragic interest. And I think that his instinct is 
right, though his argument is inconclusive. Lessing, who 
exerts 4 himself to condemn Weisse's Richard III. on ground 



1 De la Tragedie. 
3 Supra, p. 19. 



2 Dramtaurgie, ii., lxxxi. 
4 Dramaturgic ; ii., lxxxi i. 



THE " UNITIES." 



199 



of the one limitation — he has not, so far as I know., applied 
his view in detail to Shakespeare's play on the same subject — 
defends the other limitation also, saying, 1 it is a thoroughly 
horrible conception that there can be persons who are unhappy 
without any fault of their own. The heathen put this horrible 
thought as far from them as possible, and are we to cherish 
it and to enjoy dramas which confirm it, we whom religion 
and reason should have convinced that it is no less blas- 
phemous than untrue ? In all this Lessing was the child of 
his century " not yet liberated by Goethe " ; 2 I am only point- 
ing: out how close is the succession, not absolutely in all 
respects an advance, from Corneille to him. I cannot but 
think ao-ain that Corneille has the best of it in his criticism 
of Aristotle's remark, that morals in tragedy ouo;ht to be 
good. 3 

And the dramatic writings show the same connection ; the 
same abstract characterisation, typical rather than individual ; 
the same submission to the rule of " one day " 4 and to the 
comparative unity of place, interpreted much as Corneille 
interprets it ; the same ingenious refinements of emotion, 
which have caused a comparison between Lessing and Lope 
de Yega, 5 but seem rather to indicate the direct connection 
with Corneille. The reformer is usually deep-dyed with that 
which he feels the need of reforming, and it is remarkable 
how powerfully the French seventeenth century worked upon 
the ao-e of Lessinof. 

Corneille, as we have seen, was not incapable of reasoning 
upon the supposed rules of classical form. His attitude to the 
unity of the day is worth noticing, because he defends it, not 
on the score of formal symmetry, but on the score of imitative 
realism. " Beaucoup declament contre cette regie qu'ils nom- 
ment tyrannique, et auraient raison, si elle n'etait fondee que sur 
l'autorite d'Aristote ; mais ce qui la doit faire accepter, c'est la 
raison naturelle qui lui sert d'appui." 6 Corneille states his 

1 Dramaturgie, I.e. 

2 Bernays. 

3 See Dramaturgie, ii., Ixxxiii. 

4 I cannot think it accidental that both Minna v. Barnhelm and Emilia 
Galotti begin by marking the hour as early morning, so as to give time for 
all that has to pass before night. 

5 Lessing's Leben, Danzel., ii. 113. 

6 '" Des trois unites." It is worth noting, as we pass, that a striking sen- 
tence of Lessing, which introduces the long discussion on Aristotle and 



200 



HISTORY OF /ESTHETIC. 



" natural reason " as follows : the drama is an imitation or 
portrait of nature, and is more perfect the more it resembles 
it ; now " la representation dure deux heures, et resembleroit 
parfaitement si Taction quelle represente ne demanderoit pas 
davantage pour sa realite." In the Cid therefore, we re- 
member, the unhappy hero, having fought a duel one even- 
ing, and having been occupied the whole of the ensuing night 
in repelling a night attack of the enemy, is sent off to fight 
another duel first thing in the morning-, in spite of the reason- 
able remonstrance of the king, who wants it put off till the 
morrow ; but, owing, I imagine, to the imminent end of the 
theatrical " day," can only obtain for the hero one or two hours' 
breathing space. 

Here, no doubt, Corneille mistakes his ground altogether. 
The law ot imitation or portrayal was understood, as we see, 
far more profoundly than this by Aristotle ; and experience 
does not show that the stage can possibly present an unre- 
duced reproduction of two hours taken clean out of ordinary 
life. Even conversation in a novel is epitomised and reduced 
to its essence ; a stage letter is written in a few seconds ; a 
stage ball may occupy perhaps an hour from the arrival to 
the departure of the guests ; a stage banquet is merely a 
sample or suggestion of the reality. I imagine that a reduc- 
tion of scale in the parts is as essential to the drama as to 
a picture ; but no doubt there is the further difficulty, as 
Corneille implies, that large lapses of time at any point in 
the drama make the reduction altogether disproportioned. 
The ultimate principle must surely be to avoid shocking the 
imagination of the spectators ; and to this he refers, advising, 
e.g., that considerable lapses of time shall be between the acts, 
and that notes of time shall be avoided. 

I do not think there can be any doubt that however mis- 
chievous the influence of Corneille's practice and theory may 
have been on the French and German theatre, their effect in 
drawing attention, and especially Lessing's attention, to the 
antithesis of ancient rules and modern romance was a real 
step towards a vital co-ordination of the two. At any rate, 



Corneille, seems suggested by this passage, which Lessing must then have 
had before him. His words are : " Mit dem Ansehen des Aristoteles 
werde ich bald fertig werden, wenn ich es nur auch mit seinen Griinden zu 
werden wiisste." 



THE FRENCH TRADITION. 



20I 



they show us one great element of the aesthetic atmosphere 
into which Lessing was born. 

Fonteneiie and n - To realise more completely the force and 
voitaire. complacency of the tradition thus initiated, we 
may glance for a moment at the life of Corneille by Fonte- 
neiie 1 (1657-1757). A short quotation will suffice: "On 
recommenca alors a etudier le theatre des anciens, et a soup- 
conner qu'il pouvait y avoir des regies." " Les regies du 
poeme dramatique, inconnues d'abord et meprisees, quelque 
temps apres combattues, ensuite recues a demi et sous des 
conditions, demeurent enfin mattresses du theatre. Mais 
l'epoque de l'etablissement de leur empire n'est proprement 
qu'au temps de Cinna" (1640). We may add to this from 
Corneille' s Discours de I 'utility etc. : "II faut observer 
1 unite de Taction, de lieu, et de jour, personne n'en doute," 
with Voltaire's note, " On en doutaient tellement du temps de 
Corneille que ni les Anglais ni les Espagnols ne connurent 
cette regie. Les Italiens seuls l'observaient. La Sophonisbe 
de Mairest (1604-1688) fut la premiere piece en France oil 
ces trois unites parurent. La Motte, homme de beaucoup 
d'esprit et de talent, mais homme a paradoxes, a ecrit de nos 
jours contre ces trois unites ; mais cette heresie en litterature 
n'a pas fait fortune." 

These quotations from Fonteneiie and Voltaire exhibit the 
continuity of French dramatic tradition from the seventeenth 
century through the eighteenth. I especially took the oppor- 
tunity of introducing the name of Voltaire, because in his 
critical and dramatic activity, the influence of which was 
brought into the heart of Germany by his relations with 
Frederick the Great, Lessing found precisely what he wanted 
in the way of an object to attack. I conclude this very slight 
reference to the immense field of French criticism, the activity 
of which can be seen from Corneille's saying 2 that there were 
twelve current interpretations of Aristotle's " purification " 
doctrine, with Lessing's racy verdict on the whole dramatic 
and critical movement of which we have been speaking. 

"Just the same thing 3 happened to the French as to 
Gottsched [Lessing's forerunner in Germany ; the comparison 
is of interest as bringing together the movements w r hich 

1 Oeuvres de Pierre Corneille, vol. i. 3 De la IVagedie, inil. 
3 Dramaturgic, ii. lxxxi. 



202 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



Lessing inherited]. Hardly had Corneille raised their 
theatre a little above barbarism, when they thought it all 
but absolutely perfect. Racine seemed to them to have put 
the last touch to it ; and so there was no question raised 
whether a tragic poet might not be yet more pathetic and 
more touching than Corneille and Racine ; but this was 
assumed to be impossible, and the aspirations of subsequent 
poets had to limit themselves to becoming as like one of 
these two as possible. For a hundred years they have de- 
luded themselves, and to some degree their neighbours ; but 
let any one tell them so, and see what they will say ! 

' 'Of the two it was Corneille w T ho did most harm, and had the 
most disastrous influence on their tragic poets. For Racine 
misled them only by example ; Corneille both by example and 
by precept." 

The British iii- Another set of materials which entered into 
writers. t ] ie ^ ata Q f aesthetic, were furnished by the British 
writers on beauty and art. The chief of these, as distin- 
guished from the philosophers in the strict sense; were Burke, 
Lord Kaimes, Hogarth, and Reynolds, of whom the first three 
exercised a traceable influence on the German movement, 
while the latter is of interest as championing the idea of the 
characteristic in a peculiar sense, intermediate between beauty 
and expression, and forming to some extent a point of depar- 
ture for the author of the Modern Painters. 

The works of these four w T riters fall almost within the de- 
cade following Baumgarten's first publication of part of the 
^Esthetic (1750). Hogarth's Analysis of Beauty was pub- 
lished in England in 1753, and a year or two later was trans- 
lated into German by Mylius, with a preface by Lessing. 
Burke's Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful was first pub- 
lished in 1756 — the complete second edition was brought out 
in 1757 — and Lessing was long occupied with the project of 
translating it. Reynolds' papers in the Idler appeared 1758-9, 
and so far as I am aware were not known in Germany. Lord 
Kaimes' (Henry Home) Elements of Criticism, appeared in 
1 76 1, and w T as translated into German by Meinhardt, meeting 
with Lessing's warm approval. 1 



1 My authority as regards these German translations is in every case Less- 
ing's Leben (Danzel). The precise references are shown in the Index to 
that work under the several authors' names. 



BURKE AND LORD KAIMES. 



203 



To all these works we might apply with much truth the 
criticism made by Lessing on Burke in a letter of the year 
1758 : " Although the writer's principles are not worth much, 
still his book is uncommonly useful as a collection of all the 
occurrences and perceptions which the philosophers must 
assume as indisputable in inquiries of this kind. He has 
collected all the materials for a good system, which no one is 
better qualified to make use of than you" (i.e. Mendels- 
sohn). 1 

We may take Burke and Lord Kaimes together, as they 
have much in common, and then the two artists, whose views 
are related to each other as complementary opposites. , 
Burke and Lord a - The fundamental point of agreement between 
Kaimes. Burke and Lord Kaimes, marking a decided ten- 
dency towards a new departure, is the contention carried out 
by Burke with perverse ingenuity, that the natural exercise of 
any emotion, even if painful in kind, such as an emotion of 
terror or of sympathetic distress, is in itself delightful, 2 or as 
Lord Kaimes most vehemently states it, a painful emotion, if 
not abnormally violent, is agreeable upon reflection. 

This view leads up to important results. 
Burke's Purga- ct- In Burke, it is worked out in a doctrine of 
tion Theory. "Exercise necessary for the finer organs:" 3 ac- 
cording to which as these emotions (pain and terror) " clear the 
parts, whether fine or gross, of a dangerous and troublesome 
encumbrance, they are capable of producing delight." The 
resemblance of this conception to the later interpretations of 
Aristotle's KaOcxpcrl? is evident, and it makes possible, 
The sublime akin b. An exceedingly free treatment of the sublime 
to ugliness. as SO mething beside and outside the beautiful. Its 
connection with beauty, indeed, is, by Burke, far too completely 
dissolved. It is referred to ideas of pain and danger, 4 as those 
which produce the strongest of emotions, being connected as 
Burke strangely says, with the principle of self-preservation ; 
while beauty is referred to ideas of pleasure, which are con- 
nected with man's social nature. It is well, however, in 



1 Lessing's Leben, i. 350. 

2 Burke distinguishes delight from pleasure. See for the doctrine referred 
to in the text, Sublime and Beautiful, sect, xiv., and Lord Kaimes' Elements 
of Criticism, i. 97. 

3 Sublime and Beautiful, sect. vii. 

4 Sublime and Beautiful, part 1, sect. vi. 



204 



HISTORY OF ./ESTHETIC. 



bringing up new matter for theory, not to be backward in 
affirming its independence of the old ; and although both 
Burke and Lord Kaimes followed Longinus and the moderns 
who had discussed his views, 1 yet the recognition of the sub- 
lime as co-ordinate with the beautiful indicates the beginning 
of a great enlargement in aesthetic appreciation. Reconcilia- 
tion of the two opposites comes later, Burke, for instance, is 
prepared to accept ugliness, although the exact opposite of 
beauty, 2 as partly coinciding with the sublime. This is a most 
important admission. Many of the qualities in which he finds 
the sublime, e.g., formlessness, strength, magnitude, are taken 
up into Kant's treatment of the subject. 

Painful Reality c. From the principle of the agreeableness of 
not Disagreeabie. even p am f u } emotion, Burke obtains an ingenious 
reversal 3 of the time-honoured problem, "Why do we take 
pleasure in the representation of what is painful to see in 
reality." The fact is not so, he replies ; real distress and 
disaster do not cause pure pain to the spectator, but, as expe- 
rience proves, fascinate and attract him. For, considered as 
emotions, they are "delightful," though painful (as we might 
say) in content, and a theatre where the best tragedy in the 
world was being acted in the best way would be emptied at 
once by an announcement that a state criminal of high rank 
was about to be executed in the next square. 

We seem here to have the reality regarded as a representa- 
tion, i.e. in abstraction from its real bearings and interest ; 
for, as Burke insists, no normal person wishes for such a real 
catastrophe as he will run to see when it takes place. So 
that, by a reverse movement compared with that of Plato, by 
elevating reality to the rank of an aesthetic semblance, instead 
of lowering art to the rank of useful reality, we seem to 
have started the suggestion that reality can be looked at 
aesthetically if looked at without practical interest, and there- 
fore that the aesthetic temper consists, in part at least, in the 
absence of such interest. Only, so far as art and fact remain on 
one level, there is no room for identifying beauty with a deeper 
reading of fact ; and Burke, accordingly, is quite clear that 



1 Lord Kaimes alludes to a controversy between Boileau and Huet on the 
sublimity of the text, " Let there be light," which is referred to by Longinus. 

2 Sublime and Beautiful, sect. xxi. " On Ugliness." 

3 Sectt. xiv. and xv. 



BURKE AS FORMALIST. 



205 



art has no advantage over nature except that which arises 
from our pleasure in imitation. 

Anticipations of d. Other details in these writers are of historical 
later ideas, interest. The quality of grace is contrasted with 
that of dignity by Lord Kaimes, probably on a hint from 
Burke, 1 and is described as connected more particularly with 
motion, and also as peculiar to man. These ideas are fertile 
in later German thought, into which they passed partly 
through Lessing, who probably derived them from Lord 
Kaimes. 2 

These two writers, again, do much to suggest the distinction 
between poetry and painting. Burke quotes the passage of 
the Iliad, in which Helen's beauty is indicated by the effect 
of her appearance among the Trojan elders, contrasting 3 it, 
just in the manner of the Laocoon, which insists on this same 
passage, with a detailed description of a beautiful woman from 
Spenser. Poetry, he points out in the following section, is 
not strictly an imitative art ; and Lord Kaimes further insists 
that a picture is confined to a moment of time, and cannot 
take in a succession of incidents. 

Many other details of importance might be noticed in 
Burke, w 7 ho has been called materialist in aesthetic, but is 
rather perhaps in reality a formalist, in the sense that he 
simply notes as irreducible elements of beauty, certain "proper- 
ties that operate by nature, and are less liable to be altered by 
caprice than any others."^ 1 He rebels, 5 as Plotinus did, against 
the identification of beauty with proportion and fitness, 6 point- 

1 Kaimes, i. 326 ; cf. Sublime and Beautiful, sect, on " Grace." 

2 Lessing's Leben, ii. 43. Schiller's Anmuth u. Wiirde is also definitely 
influenced by a passage in Winckelmann, in which " Grace " is compared to 
the girdle of Aphrodite. Gesch. d. K., 8. 2. 16. I should assume them to 
be independent, though the thought is fundamentally the same as in Kaimes 
and Lessing. 

3 Sublime and Beautiful ' ; sect. "On effect of words." Cf. Kaimes, 87 and 
Laocoon, S. 22. 

4 Sublime and Beautiful, sect. 18. The most materialistic suggestion 
in Burke is reproduced, though not as a fundamental principle of aesthetic, by 
Lessing, when he advises the actor to study the physical effects of passion on 
the ground that these effects, being well imitated, will tend to arouse the 
passion in question. Cf. Sublime and Beautiful, Cause of Pain and Fear 
with Hamburg. Dram at., 1. iii. I imagine that modern psychology tends to 
support this suggestion. 

5 Sublime and Beautiful. Part III. ii.-vi. 

6 " In beauty, the effect is previous to any knowledge of the use." III. vii. 
Cf. Kant's definition of " Zweckmassigskeit ohne Vorstellung eines Zweckes." 



206 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



ing out quite justly that proportion per se is simply a relation 
of quantity, and thus " wholly indifferent to the mind" (as 
judging of beauty). This argument is valuable as urging that 
not every proportion, and therefore not proportion as such, 
constitutes beauty ; but in pushing it to the limit of maintain- 
ing that in beauty there is no specially subtle orderliness, he 
seems to be denying what he ought to be investigating, and 
to be turning his back on his own important suggestions of 
the value of gradation or variation, and of variation of varia- 
tion. 1 

Lastly, it is important to note that Lord Kaimes anticipates 
Lessing in pointing out the connection 2 between the unities 
of time and place, and the continuity of representation and 
uninterrupted presence of the chorus in Greek drama, and 
makes this an argument for greater freedom on the modern 
stage, while always demanding a certain economy of the 
spectator's imagination. 

I do not wish it to be inferred from the space which I have 
devoted to these two critical writers, that I consider them to 
be sesthetic thinkers of a high rank, or that I desire to pull 
down Lessing from his eminence by the perpetual indication 
of his debt to them. The enumeration of details — and I have 
enumerated but a fraction of what well deserve to be men- 
tioned — necessarily occupies more space than the statement 
of a single philosophical doctrine of the very first importance. 
But in history we must have details ; and to me at least the 
concentration of influences from all quarters in the microcosm 
of a great intellect is one of the most fascinating problems 
that can be put before a historian of philosophy. Lessing 
himself knew well what his genius owed to his learning ; 
especially he sympathised with the English mind, and to be 
well acquainted with the English literature was to win his 
warm commendation. 3 

ft. Hogarth's Analysis of Beauty was pub- 
lished, as we saw, three years before burkes 
Enquiry, and Hogarth is mentioned, with an approving 
reference to his " line of beauty," in Part III., sect. xiv. of the 
latter work. The Analysis was enthusiastically welcomed 



1 Sublime and Beautiful. " Variation, why beautiful" ? 

2 Elements of Criticism, 2. ch. 23. "The Three Unities." 

3 Les sing's Leben, ii. 5. 



THE LINE OF BEAUTY. 



207 



by Lessing in the Vossische Zeitung in 1754. 1 We may 
conveniently attach our account of Hogarth to Lessing's 
appreciation of him. In the review of 1754 (written when 
Lessing was only 25), he greets Hogarth's ideas as a new 
light on the whole material of art, as a system calculated to 
reduce to certainty men's conflicting ideas as to what is 
pleasing, and to abolish the wretched proverb that there is 
no disputing about tastes, " and as likely to make the term 
beauty suggest as much in the way of thought as it has 
hitherto suggested in the way of feeling." Later, however, 
in the preface to the German translation of Hogarth's work, 
Lessing lays his finger on the point of difficulty in its con- 
ception, viz. the question of determining, on general grounds, 
the degree and kind of curvature that constitutes beauty of 
line. For Hogarth " represents 2 in his first plate a number of 
undulating lines, of which he only takes one to merit the name 
of beautiful, namely that which is curved neither too much 
nor too little." Lessing had an idea that a mathematical in- 
vestigation might solve the difficulty, which finds no answer 
beyond an appeal to unanalysed examples in Hogarth him- 
self, whose idea was suggested to him by a remark ascribed 
to Michael Angelo. It is worth while to distinguish, accord- 
ing to the view which I have adopted throughout, the two 
elements of the problem, which Hogarth himself industriously 
confuses. If the question is, whether, as a simple geometri- 
cal form, one line is more beautiful than other lines, this is a 
legitimate problem, and can be answered, within certain 
limits, so long as the effects of suggestive representation are 
excluded. And from this point of view it is of the greatest 
interest to contrast Hogarth's idea of the undulating and 
spiral line with Plato's conception of the most beautiful form 
as the straight line or the circle. 3 For here we have the 
antithesis of ancient and modern reduced to terms of the 
ancient or formal theory. So far as Hogarth has any general 
conception it is still the " one in the many" that he believes 
to be beauty ; but with him it is the " intricacy," the " continuity 



1 Lessing's Leben, ii. 22. Schasler must have been misled by some mis- 
print into supposing Hogarth's work to have been published in 1763, and 
so after the Enquiry. Why he put Burke's Enquiry after Lord Kaimes' 
Elements, in opposition to his own dates, I cannot imagine. 

2 Lessing, in the Leben, 223, note. 
See p. 33 above. 



208 



HISTORY OF /ESTHETIC. 



of variety " rather than the element of unity, which is the 
more important side. He even appeals to pure decorative 
design in support of this idea, describing in striking lan- 
guage the pleasure afforded him by the " stick and ribbon " 
ornament, which he compares with that of watching a country 
dance. 

This pure decoration, without very complex representative 
suggestion, is the true sphere of pure formal or geometrical 
beauty ; and had he sought to apply his theory within this 
more abstract region, he might have laid a firm analytic 
foundation for aesthetic inquiry. As it is, he stands alone, I 
think, among eighteenth century writers in even alluding to 
this great branch of art, which presents the problems of 
beauty in their simplest and most general form. 

But going at once to the most complex of all aesthetic 
problems, that of the beauty of the human figure, in which 
suggestions of character, intellect, passion, are inextricably 
intermingled, he loses his way, or rather, makes no progress 
at all in the attempt to reduce its wealth of meaning to any 
one formal type or principle, and does not even attempt 
to show within what limits his serpentine line — the line made 
by twisting a wire evenly round a cone — has that degree of 
continuity in variety which constitutes the beautiful. The 
fact is, that these lower or more abstract grades of expressive 
form are liable to have their significance overridden by the 
more complex suggestions connected with life and character, 
and it is not an axiom that a beautiful human figure can 
be constructed out of forms all of which have independently 
the highest geometrical beauty. 

Thus Hogarth's analysis of beauty, drawn from formative 
art only, represents the abstract principle of unity in variety 
on its highest level, so as to form a point of transition to the 
analysis of the present century, which finds a characteristic 
significance in curves, for example, which vary progressively. It 
is against him that Burke is arguing when he disputes the im- 
portance of proportion and fitness in accounting for beauty. 
It is a fact both of interest and of importance that Hogarth's 
undulating line supplied Goethe with a name for the tendency 
which he ranks as the polar opposite of the characteristic, when 
representing in a scheme 1 the extreme inclinations of artists, 



1 Der Sammler u. die Seinigen. 



BEAUTY AS THE AIM OF NATURE. 



209 



and the central combination in which alone they produce true 
art. It is remarkable that in his artistic practice Hogarth 
himself pursues the characteristic beyond the border of 
ugliness. 

Reynolds 7' R evn °lds' three papers in the Idler {or 1759, 
which form the point of departure for the chapter 
in Modern Painters, " Touching the Grand Style," 1 seem 
to be in more ways than one determined by opposition to 
Hogarth. " The flowing line, which constitutes grace and 
beauty," and the "pyramidal principle " 2 are satirised in the 
first pages. And though the satire is not serious in tone, 
being directed against silly connoisseurship and not against 
any genuine theory, yet the reference in this paper to a 
Vandyck portrait of Charles I., which the self-styled connois- 
seur refuses to admire, as a " perfect representation of the 
character as well as the figure of the man," prepares the way 
for Reynolds' own account of beauty. This, although fairly 
open to Ruskin's criticism in as far as it derives our pleasure 
in beauty from mere custom, suggests an actual ground for 
the force of custom in this province, which Ruskin does not 
notice. " Every species of the animal as well as the vegetable 
creation may be said to have a fixed or determinate form to- 
wards which Nature is continually inclining, like various lines 
terminating in the centre ; or it may be compared to pendulums 
vibrating in different directions over one central point ; and 
as they all cross the centre though only one passes through 
any other point, so it will be found that perfect beauty is 
oftener produced by nature, than deformity." ' 3 It is true that 
Reynolds doubts whether one species is (as we should say) 
objectively more beautiful than another ; but he is clear that 
" in creatures of the same species, beauty is the medium or 
centre of all various forms." 

Here then we have an intermediate position. Specific char- 
acterisation is set against geometrical formalism on the one 



1 Vol. iii. ch. 1. 

2 More clearly aimed at Hogarth are the words in No. 82 : " but if he pre- 
tends to defend the preference he gives to one or the other (swan or dove) by 
endeavouring to prove that this more beautiful form proceeds from a particu- 
lar gradation of magnitude, undulation of a curve, or direction of a line. . 
he will find at last that the great Mother of Nature will not be subjected to 
such narrow rules." 

3 Idler, No. 82. 

P 



2 IO 



HISTORY OF /ESTHETIC. 



hand, and individual characterisation on the other, and con- 
stitutes, historically speaking, a point of transition between the 
two. We shall see that even for Goethe the " characteristic " 
has some affinity with the specific type, and is opposed, in a 
way which strikes us as strange, to the intensified rendering 
of individual attributes. Plainly, the movement of natural 
science has played a part in the transformation of this concep- 
tion. Reynolds evidently thinks that a central or average 
form in each species represents the purpose of nature. I 
suppose that if we to-day could attach any meaning to a pur- 
pose or inclination of nature, we should interpret it dynamically, 
and should regard it as likely to be ahead of any existing indivi- 
dual forms, or at any rate as various, and incapable of exhaus- 
tion within a single typical or central figure. This influence 
must obviously force forward our conception of central or 
essential reality from the species to the individual, and from 
the "invariable" to the law of variation, which is itself a kind 
of invariable. 

Finally it is a curious anticipation of the German "period 
of genius " that Reynolds contends for the rights of genius 
against the tendency, exemplified in Hogarth, to attach prac- 
tical importance to critical rules. In all these — in Hogarth's 
development of antique formalism, in Burke's acceptance of 
the sublime as a complement to the beautiful, and in his revolt 
against the worship of mere proportion, in Lord Kaimes' ad- 
mission of the painful within the sphere of the agreeable, and 
his desire to emancipate the modern drama from the rigid 
unities of space and time, and in Reynolds' effort to dissociate 
the grand style from decorative formalism, and explain it with 
reference to a normal or central "inclination of nature" ex- 
pressed by specific characterisation — in all this we find 
embodied the antithesis of abstract and concrete expressiveness, 
forced upon the modern world by the mere fact of its contrast 
with the ancient, and especially with the very abstract tradition 
by which that ancient world was represented to it. 
Germans before lv - We have now very briefly to trace the con- 
Lessing. flicting elements in which this same contrast of 
ancient rule and modern expressiveness existed in Germany, 
before it was resolved into a vital and progressive aesthetic by 
Lessing and his contemporaries. 

The time — the early eighteenth century — was in Germany 
one of immense and varied activity, in which foreign 



A GERMAN DRAMA. 



2 I I 



material, both French and English, was being eagerly appro- 
priated, and was producing strangely diverse effects on the 
inexperienced genius of the nation. The few observations 
by which I shall try to focus this animated scene as a back- 
ground for the representation of Lessing's and Winckelmann's 
aesthetic achievements will be, even more than the rest of this 
work, devoid of all claims to full historical adequacy, and will 
merely select those leading and causal tendencies which bear 
directly on the growth of aesthetic perception. 

The two great critical problems which Lessing inherited 
from the generation immediately before him were, a, The 
relation of a German national drama to the pseudo-classical 
French theatre, and consequently to the true mind of anti- 
quity which this latter parodied ; this was the essential subject 
of his Dramaturgie ; and /3, The value of strictly descriptive 
or pictorial poetry, a species of art which marked both the 
classical decadence and the first flush of the modern senti- 
mental interest in nature, and which seemed to be justified 
by the voice of antiquity, and by a misunderstanding of the 
tradition that art lay in the imitation of natural objects. 
The relation between poetic and pictorial beauty is the subject 
of the Laocoon. 

The former question is chiefly connected at this epoch with 
the name of Gottsched ; the latter with the poetry and 
theories of Bodmer and Breitinger, the ''Swiss" or the 
Zurich critics. I will speak of these two sects, as in fact they 
were, very shortly, with reference to these problems. 

Gottsched °" Gottsched (i 700-1 766) was lecturing at Leip- 
sic in 1 746, when Lessing matriculated there, both 
on the History of Philosophy, using as a text-book his 
own Elements, which is said to have been a Wolffian 
compendium, and on " Poetik, ad critices sanioris normam," 
"the art of poetry in conformity with a sounder criti- 
cism." 1 He represented in Germany a similar reaction 
against utter formlessness in the drama, to that which we 
have observed to take place both in England and in France. 
He set himself the task of creating a German literature, and 
more especially a German drama, worthy to rank with that 
of other nations. In attempting this, with the whole weight 
of his position at Leipzig, then a leading literary centre, of 



Lessing's Leben, L 51. 



2 I 2 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



extreme industry, both on his own part and on that of his 
circle, in original writing, in translation, and in journalism, and 
of his friendship with an important society of actors (Neuber's), 
who accepted the new plays in French taste which he pre- 
scribed, and were imitated in their submission by the ordinary 
travelling companies, he succeeded for good or evil in banish- 
ing the coarse and wild popular dramas of the later seven- 
teenth century with the clown and the Faust, and replacing 
them by plays of French origin, or on French models, repre- 
senting the ideas of classical taste and correctness then current 
in the literary world. The Deutsche Schaubuhne (1740- 
1745) was the collection of plays, both original and translated, 
which he issued as an instrument of his enterprise. 1 

Lessing, who relied on the Greeks and on Shakespeare as 
his guides in dramatic questions, appears to have condemned 
this interruption of German development by French influence 
as a wholly false departure. " No one will deny," a contem- 
porary periodical had alleged, 2 " that the German stage owes 
a great part of its earlier improvements to Professor Gott- 
sched." " I am that no one," rejoins Lessing ; " I deny it 
altogether. It were to be wished that Gottsched had never 
meddled with the theatre. His supposed improvements 
either concern the most utter trifles, or are actually changes 
for the worst. He did not," Lessing continues, " aim at 
improving the ancient German theatre, but at creating a new 
one. And what sort of a new one ? Why, a Frenchified 
one ; without considering whether this Frenchified drama was 
suitable to the German mind." 

Lessing's biographers, exceedingly careful students of the 
German eighteenth century, do not assent to this extreme 
view. Admitting that there was a natural kinship between 
the great English dramatists and the popular German drama 
of the seventeenth century, they yet deny that the latter could 
of itself have developed into a true national dramatic literature 
cognate with that of England, On the contrary, they main- 
tain with great show of reason that Lessing's conception of 
his problem, to establish a national theatre on the principles 
of Aristotle and Shakespeare, only became possible after, and 
because of, the work of Gottsched in bringing the German 
drama into some kind of literary form. 3 



1 Encyl. Brit., art. " Gottsched." 2 Lessing's Leben, i. 439. 
3 Lessing's Leben^ i. 103, 438-7. 



A GERMAN DRAMA. 



213 



It must further be remarked that Gottsched, in his anxiety 
to prove that there was, and therefore could be, a German 
drama, and to bring all influences to bear upon remodelling 
it, called attention to the older plays, of whose form he 
entirely disapproved, by his historical notices of them in the 
" Nothiger Vorrath zur Geschichte der Deutschen drama- 
tischen Dichtkunst " (materials for a history of German dra- 
matic poetry), and both himself, and through his wife, an 
indefatigable authoress and translator, brought much of real 
value to the knowledge of the German public. Thus Ma- 
dame Gottsched translated Moliere's Misanthrope, the whole 
of the English Spectator, and Pope's Rape of the Lock. 

Of Gottsched's dramatic theorising I give a single speci- 
men, from his rules for the construction of a tragic plot. 1 
" The poet selects a moral doctrine, which he desires to im- 
press upon his readers in a sensuous form. For this pur- 
pose he devises the general framework of a story, such as to 
exhibit the truth of the doctrine. Then he searches in history 
for famous persons to whom incidents occurred somewhat 
similar to those of his story, and borrows their names for the 
personages of his plot in order to give them distinction." 
Lessing remarks on this that if the Hercules Furens contains 
any such doctrine, it must either be that virtue and heroism 
are an increased provocation to an angry Deity, or that one 
should avoid being a natural son of Zeus if one wants to 
escape the persecution of Hera. Lessing seems always just 
a little too clever. Even the English reader, if he knows 
Browning's translation of the Heracles, especially the chorus 
" Even a dirge," will be inclined to demur to the substance of 
Lessing's criticism no less than to the form of Gottsched's 
prescription. Yet Lessing himself retained throughout, and 
in some degree bequeathed even to Goethe, the pseudo-clas- 
sical and moralistic traditions of Corneille and Gottsched. 
And it is necessary to express a very serious doubt whether 
the enterprise in which not only Gottsched, but Lessing, 
Schiller and Goethe spent the best of their strength, the 
establishment of a German national drama, can be held to 
have thoroughly succeeded. Whether Faust is a sufficient 
reward to the world for the labours of several great men 
through two-thirds of a century, might well be questioned, if 



Gottsched, Kritisclie Dichthuist, quoted in Lessing's Leben, i. 184. 



214 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



it were worth while to quarrel with the course of history. 
The outcome of their labours, it may be held, was great in- 
deed, but was not what they sought. The real German 
national art, the art of music, grew up of itself behind their 
backs while they were arguing about painting and poetry. 
What they did create by their deep and energetic study of 
the best utterances of mind and the best thoughts about those 
utterances, was not German art, but German philosophy. 
mT . „_ . „ 8 The "Swiss" critics and poets -Bodmer and 

The " Swiss." -o . . , ^ i v 

breitinger, almost exactly Gottscned s contempora- 
ries, with their friends and partisans, represent an influence on 
the whole opposed to that of Gottsched. In them the meeting 
of extremes, the sense of a unity between ancient and modern 
life, which was the sign of a deeper criticism and truer sense 
of beauty, began to show itself, though in a weak and super- 
ficial form, which gives a faint augury of the age of Goethe. 

Wieland, 1733-18 13, who in his youth was a friend of the 
Swiss, 1 and who lived to be satirized by Goethe, may be taken 
as a measure of the difference between the culture of the 
two periods. The Swiss critics stood up for Homer, Milton, 
Ariosto, 2 against Gottsched's pseudo-classicism, which allied 
itself, as a mechanical system of rules, with a narrow rational- 
ism, attacking, for example, the use of the marvellous in 
Homer and Milton. 

The openness of interest which gave them this power of 
sympathy with really great art, attracted them also to a 
modern type of poetry which though great things came of it 
afterwards, at first declared itself with a good deal of con- 
fusion in its aims. Sentimentalism, such as that of Klop- 
stock, 3 whom the Zurich critics had influenced, and in whom 
they at first believed, and the interest in peasant life and 
romantic scenery, came together in their minds. Pictorial 
poetry was stimulated by Thomson's Seasons, which Brocker 4 
was translating between 1740 and 1750, and was commended 
by them in theory, 5 and produced, after Haller, by Kleist 
(Fruhling, 1749) and Gessner (Idylls, 1756) who was a 
painter as well as poet. 

1 Scherer, ii. 41. 

2 Scherer, ii. 24 ; Lessing's Leben, ii. 18. 

3 Scherer, ii. 31. 

4 Scherer, ii. 38. 

5 In Breitinger's Dichikutist, Lessing's Leben, ii. 18. 



SUCCESSORS OF THE SWISS. 



In speaking of Archaeology I referred to the works of 
Spence and Caylus, which betray the idea that the difference 
of medium between painting and poetry makes no serious 
difference in the scope of those two arts, and this conception 
appears to have been generally current in the age before 
Lessing, although it found special expression in the criticism 
and poetry of the Zurich circle. The Laocoon, it is said, was 
aimed primarily at the Swiss, 1 as the Dramaturgie at Gott- 
sched, Corneille, Voltaire ; we have only to modify this by 
remembering that Winckelmann himself was at first a dis- 
ciple of the Swiss, and that in his early work " on the imita- 
tion of Greek painting- and sculpture" (1755) he actually says 
" that the limits of painting may be as wide as those of 
poetry, and that it is possible for the painter to follow the 
poet, just as it is for the musician. 2 Certainly, as Lessing's 
biographer observes, it sounds very much as if this sentence 
had suggested the second title of the Laocoon, " Of the limits 
of poetry and painting." 

Before passing on, however, we must note that the Swiss 
genius, and the impulse of Thomson's poetry, were not ex- 
hausted in the crude thought and fancy that helped to elicit 
the Laocoon. Rousseau ( 1 7 1 2-1778) and De Saussure ( 1 740- 
1 799) inherited the same genius in more powerful forms. 
The antagonism of Rousseau and Voltaire reproduces on a 
higher level that of Breitinger and Gottsched ; and Rousseau 
is the true inaugurator of modern romantic naturalism. It 
seems worth while to illustrate the many-sided influence of 
Rousseau outside revolutionary politics by a quotation from 
Amiel, himself too a native of Geneva. "J. J. Rousseau is 
an ancestor in all things. It was he who founded travelling 
on foot before Topffer, reverie before Rene, literary botany 
before George Sand, the worship of nature before Bernardin 
de St. Pierre, the democratic theory before the revolution of 
1789, political discussion and theological discussion before 
Mirabeau and Renan, the science of teaching before Pesta- 
lozzi, and Alpine description before De Saussure." 
" Nobody, again, has had more influence than he upon the 
nineteenth centuryv for Byron, Chateaubriand, Madame de 
Stael and George Sand all descend from him. 3 



Lessing's Leben. 2 Quoted Lessing's Leben t ii. 20. 
' 6 Amiel, Journal Intime, E. Tr., i. 202. 



216 



HISTORY OF AESTHETIC. 



If Rousseau was the first nature-sentimentalist, De Saussure, 
also a native of Geneva, was the first student-mountaineer. 
We can hardly realise to-day the void of knowledge and feeling 
in the time before 1787, when Mont Blanc was ascended by 
De Saussure, and also by another traveller, having never, it 
appears, been ascended before. In De Saussure, as all readers 
of the Modern Pai7tters x are aware, we have an influence that 
has operated powerfully in impressing on the modern sense of 
Alpine beauty its peculiar character of loving and penetrating 
study, which involves the reconciliation of the scientific and 
artistic spirit, and is the root of our singular delight in obser- 
vant sympathy with the characteristic law and essence of 
mountain conformation. 

v. I am convinced that Lessing ought to be 
treated in the history of aesthetic before Winckel- 
mann, and not in the reverse order, which Schasler adopts. 
The mere dates of their lives and writings are not decisive. 
Winckelmann was indeed born twelve years before Lessing, 
and his assassination took place thirteen years before Lessing's 
death. It is also true that Lessing's Laocoon takes its text 
from an early work of Winckelmann, and mentions before 
its close his greater and later work, the history of ancient 
plastic art. But yet Lessing, as we have seen, springs from 
what went before him, from literary and dramatic criticism, 
and the conflict of the quasi-classical with the romantic drama 
which had been observed in the sixteenth century by Sidney, 
and throughout the seventeenth had been a subject of Euro- 
pean interest. Lessing uses Winckelmann, it is true, but not 
as a younger man uses his predecessors ; rather as a recog- 
nised authority defines his position with reference to the ideas 
of a contemporary whose starting-point is other than his own. 
The historical side of Winckelmann's work, the recognition 
of variety and relativity in the beautiful of formative art, is 
as good as unknown to Lessing, whose capacity, and conse- 
quently his appreciation, lay entirely in the region of litera- 
ture. 

Now Winckelmann, on the other hand, made a new depar- 
ture, which connects itself rather with what came after him 
than with what went before. It is true that he could not have 
seen any of Lessing's more important works before his own 



1 See especially Modern Painters, iv. 402. 



LESSING S POSITION'. 



were written. But his interest was pre-occupied with study in 
a different sphere, and Lessing's influence could not greatly 
have helped, though it might have hindered him. Practically, 
he possesses in the field of plastic art all that Lessing 
could in that region, have suggested to him, and he adds more 
to it. 

Lessing, in short, represented an earlier tradition, and 
profited little by Winckelmann's great work, which came to 
him when his views were completed. Winckelmann repre- 
sented a new departure on parallel, but different lines, and so 
far as we can judge, would not have written otherwise than 
he did if he had lived ten or twenty years later, and been well 
acquainted with the Laocoon. 

Therefore continuity of subject is better preserved by deal- 
ing with Lessing first and Winckelmann second ; and the 
chronological relations of the two writers do not amount to a 
contradiction of this arrangement, which is further justified by 
the superior concreteness of Winckelmann's analysis as com- 
pared with that of Lessing. 

It must be understood that I can only speak of Lessing's 
contributions to the material of aesthetic. His theological 
and semi-philosophical writings do not concern us here, except 
in as far as they may have strengthened some particular 
elements of his critical influence. 

ms conception a - Lessing ( 1 7 2 9- 1 78 1 ) holds an intermediate 
of criticism, position between the practical and the philosophi- 
cal critic ; between the legislator for art, and the investiga- 
tor of beauty. No one man in modern times has clone more 
than he to show the futility of art-formulae uncritically accepted 
from tradition, and to substitute for them that living insight 
which reveals the common root of human nature in the classical 
as in the romantic world. And yet he believed in rules. He 
believed that the critic was the poet's guide. He thought that 
the true laws of poetry were embodied in Homer and Sopho- 
cles, and explained in Aristotle ; and in withstanding the 
formlessness of the "age of genius," he did not appear to 
distinguish obedience to critical rules from practical training 
in artistic forms. Thus he strikes us throughout as attached 
to the older views by the purpose of his thought, if he belongs 
to modern criticism by its content. It is worth while to set 
this essential point in a clear light at starting, by quoting the 
famous self-estimate from the closing chapter of his dramatic 



218 



HISTORY OF .ESTHETIC. 



criticism, the Hamburgische Dramaturgic (1767-8), almost 
his latest strictly aesthetic production. 

44 I am 1 neither actor nor poet. My friends often do me 
the honour of acknowledging me to be the latter. But only 
because they mistake me. So indulgent a conclusion should 
not be drawn from some dramatic attempts on which I have 
ventured. Not every one is a painter who takes a brush in 
his hand, and daubs with colours. The earliest of those 
attempts were written at an age when one so readily takes 
enjoyment and facility for genius ; all that is tolerable in the 
later pieces I am well aware that I owe simply and solely to 
criticism. I do not feel in myself the living spring which 
rises by its own power in pure and abundant jets ; I have to 
press everything out of myself by force-pumps. I should be 
so poor, so cold, so shortsighted, if I had not learned in some 
degree to borrow others' wealth, to warm myself at others' fire, 
and to strengthen my eyes with the lenses of art. Therefore 
I have always been vexed or ashamed when I have heard 
anything in disparagement of criticism. They say it chokes 
genius ; I flattered myself that it had given me something 
that comes very near genius. I am a cripple, who cannot 
possibly be edified by a satire against crutches. 

" But, no doubt, though crutches help a cripple to move 
from place to place, yet they do not make him a runner : and 
it is just so with criticism." . . . [After repeating that 
he has been a student of dramatic form], 44 but one may study 
oneself deeper into error. What assures me that I have 
not done so, and that I do not mistake the essence of dra- 
matic art, is the fact that I understand it precisely as Aristotle 
has abstracted it from the innumerable masterpieces of the 
Greek stage. ... I do not hesitate to confess (even if in 
these enlightened times I am to be laughed out of countenance 
for it) that I hold the Poetics to be as infallible as the elements 
of Euclid. Its principles are just as true and as certain, only 
not so simple, and therefore more exposed to misrepresenta- 
tion. Especially I believe that I can prove with reference to 
tragedy, the account of which is preserved to us pretty com- 
plete, that it cannot move a step from Aristotle's direction 
without departing from its own perfection in the same 
measure." French tragedy, he goes on to say, had long 



1 Hamburgische Dramaturgic, ii. 101-104. 



LESSING ON CORNEILLE. 



passed for the embodiment of the ancient rules ; and then, 
genuine feeling being awakened by some English pieces 
which obviously broke the French rules, the German public 
went to the other extreme, and thought these rules were 
needless and perhaps injurious. " And even this might have 
passed — but they began to confuse all rules with these rules, 
and to set it down as pedantry to prescribe to genius at all 
what it may do and what it may not. In short, we were on 
the point of presumptuously forfeiting all the experience of the 
past, and of demanding that every poet should invent the art 
anew for himself. 

" I should be vain enough to think that I had deserved well 
of our theatre if I could suppose that I had hit upon the only 
means of arresting this fermentation of our taste. At least 
I may flatter myself that I have worked to this end, for I have 
studied nothing so much as to attack the illusion of the regu- 
larity of the French stage. No nation has misunderstood the 
rules of the ancient drama more than the French. Some inci- 
dental remarks which they found in Aristotle about the most 
convenient arrangement of the drama, they have assumed to 
be essential ; and on the other hand have so emasculated what 
really was essential by all kinds of limitations and interpreta- 
tions, that such views could, inevitably, give rise only to works 
that must remain far below the highest effect which the philo- 
sopher had reckoned on in his rules. 

" I venture at this point to make an assertion which you may 
take as you please. Show me the piece of the great Corneille, 
which I would not improve upon. 1 What will you bet ? 

" Yet no ; I should not like this assertion to pass for bragga- 
docio. So note carefully what I add to it. I certainly should 
improve upon the play — and yet be a long way from being a 
Corneille — and be a long way from having achieved a master- 
piece. I certainly should improve upon it, and ought not to 
think much of myself for doing so. I should have done 
nothing but what anyone could do whose faith in Aristotle is 
as firm as mine." 

Now we have to bear in mind that it is at least open to 
doubt whether the form of art about which Lessing's practical 
interest was thus pre-occupied had not already, at the time 



1 " Besser machen." I think it means not " amend," but write a better 
play on the same story. 



220 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



when he was writing, become a matter of merely historical 
concern. Granting that Shakespearian tragedy falls within it, 
as Lessing vehemently contended, it must still be held, as I 
suggested above, that there was not in Lessing's lifetime, and 
never has been since in any country of Europe, a continuous 
and considerable development of serious drama, which, while 
capable of maintaining itself on the stage, has also entered into 
the greater literature of the world. It may be that the spirit 
of the Poetic applies to the novel, and to serious comedy, and 
to Wagnerian opera, and to the mixed realistic drama of our 
own day, in short to all imaginative narration and portrayal of 
life. I am not at present discussing this substantive problem, 
but merely pointing out that neither in its Hellenic nor in its 
Shakespearian shape was the precise species of art which to 
Lessing is so present and vital an interest, apparently destined 
to revive. His tone would have been entirely different, and 
his judgment of Corneille probably much more lenient, had he 
realised that the problem before him was one of history, in- 
volving gradation and at least external variation, and not of 
the practical resuscitation of a definite kind of play. 

This difference between Lessing's actual position and that 
in which he believed himself to be placed, explains to us at 
once the nature and limits of his achievement. He never 
understood his own function to be primarily that of unveiling 
the true connection between the modern and the antique in 
literature. Everywhere the thought of the drama, especially 
of tragedy, as a species of art that has unique value, and is 
about to come to its rights, is in the background of his treat- 
ment. This is the case even in the Laocoon ; so much so, 
that it was his intention 1 to have closed the treatise with a 
discussion that should have established the drama to be the 
highest form of poetry, and his definition of poetry as having 
action for its object-matter is contributory to this view (Action 
= " Handlung "=* Spa/ma), although action at its widest may in- 
clude for him anything that goes on in time. 

Aim of the P- If now we recall that "the Swiss" with 

Laocoon. their friends, following Thomson, were introducing 
pictorial description into poetry, while Winckelmann in the 
early work which furnishes Lessing's text had declared for 
allegory as the highest purpose of formative art, we can very 



1 Scherer, E. Trans., ii. 68. 



OCCASION OF THE LAOCOON. 



22 1 



easily appreciate the main contention of the treatise which 
has for its title 44 Laocoon, or, of the limits of painting and 
poetry." Its aim was in short to expel pictorial description 
from poetry, and to deny to formative art any direct concern 
with action, and therefore with expression or significance. 
The writer's aim w r as no doubt impartial, and the limits of 
poetry were to be straitened in accordance with the same 
principle which was to cut off large provinces from the do- 
minion of 44 painting" (formative art). And yet it is the case 
that Lessing, from the mere tendency of his genius, on the 
whole took the side of poetry, as Winckelmann did that of 
painting and sculpture, while Lessing left the idea of the 
latter arts in undeveloped abstraction, and Winckelmann did 
nothing for the theory of the former. The achievement of 
each, in his sphere, was nothing less than passing from the 
abstract to the concrete, recognising that beauty is an utter- 
ance which has many grades and forms, and facing the ques- 
tion of the relation between them and the possibility of their 
combination. 

The occasion of the Laocoon was such as to show with a 
force amounting to irony, the superior importance of ideas 
as compared with particular facts. Winckelmann had said, 
in his treatise On the Imitation of Greek Works of Painting 
and Sculpture, that the expression in Greek statues always 
revealed a great and composed soul, and that this was illus- 
trated by the famous Laocoon group, in which Laocoons 
features expressed no such extremity of suffering as would 
be realistically in accordance with the situation, and more 
particularly, did not indicate him to be crying out, as Virgil 
describes him. Lessing, aroused, as he admits, 1 by the im- 
plied censure on Virgil, maintains that the absence of agonised 
expression in Laocoon's features, and of all sign of outcry 
— which he completely accepts as a fact 2 — is to be accounted 
for not by the demands of Greek character, but by the laws 
of Greek sculpture ; in other words, that portrayal of extreme 
suffering and its expression, legitimate in poetry, was pro- 
hibited by the law and aim of beauty, which he alleged to 
be supreme in formative art. 

1 Laocoon, i. 

2 Lessing had of course never seen the original of the Laocoon, when this 
was written. I do not know that he had ever seen a cast ; probably his 
judgment was formed from engravings. 



2 2 2 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



Now the tendency of skilled criticism ever since Lessing's 
day has been to deny the alleged fact that Laocoon is re- 
presented in the marble group as silent or nearly so, and with 
an expression far removed from that of extreme bodily suffer- 
ing. 1 The truth appears to be that the group is a work of 
the Rhodian school, which retained little of the great Greek 
style, and was chiefly distinguished by technical skill and 
forcible presentation of ideas. 2 The expression of pain is 
violent, and the abstinence from crying out is exceedingly 
doubtful. It is remarkable that the observation with reference 
to which such influential theories were propounded, should be 
of questionable accuracy. We have to bear in mind both 
that the real basis of a tolerable theory is always wider than 
the case selected for exposition, and also that a statue which 
seems almost un- Hellenic when compared with the marbles 
of the Parthenon, might appear full of Greek dignity when 
compared with works by the degenerate successors of Michael 
Angelo. 

Passing from the occasion, which has an interest chiefly 
for curiosity, to the substance of Lessing's criticism, we find 
it to be introduced as follows. Winckelmann had treated the 
comparative calmness which he saw in the features of Laocoon 
as the expression of a great and composed soul which, in 
conformity with the Greek spirit, was above giving way to 
suffering. Lessing replied, appealing triumphantly to the 
example of Philoctetes, which Winckelmann had unwarily 
adduced, that it was not the fact that a great soul was held, 
among the Greeks, to be incapable of violent expressions of 
emotion ; and that therefore the reason for the dignity or 
self-control apparent in the Laocoon must be other than that 
alleged by Winckelmann. And this reason, he continued, 
lay not in any form or law of expression relative to character, 
but simply in the demands of [formal] beauty, which he 
asserted, to be sovereign in the province of formative art. 
Now between him and Winckelmann there was so far no 
very grave matter at issue. For Winckelmanns " expres- 
sion " is always relative to that which it expresses ; and the 
expression of "a great and tranquil soul," which he divines 
to belong to the greatest period of Greek art, is for him 
almost or quite within the lines of formal beauty. But for 



Overbeck, ii. 281. 



2 Murray, ii. 369. 



lessing's style. 223 



Lessing this is a matter of principle. It is not any particular 
degree of expression, but the acceptance of expression as a 
principle of formative art, against which he feels bound to 
make war. Beauty and expression are for him incompatible, 
and the one can only exist at the expense of the other. Some 
feeling of the same kind will be found also in Winckelmann, 
who does not avoid inconsistency in explaining it away. 

7. Lessing, however, does not rest in a pre- 

Demarcation of ' . r 1 • i • 1 tt 11 1 r 

"Painting" and conception oi this kind. He deduces the dis- 
Poetry. tiflction between poetry and " painting " from the 
nature of their respective media, and in doing so, undoubtedly, 
as Mr. Sully observes, 1 he pioneers the true road of modern 
aesthetic. And he makes an advance, it must once for all be 
noted, as much by his style and method as by his results. 
He has been called, indeed, a man of the understanding, in 
the technical sense ascribed to the latter term by idealist 
philosophy, that is to say, a man of sharp antitheses, the sides 
of which are not explained in terms of one another, but are 
simply left as ultimate contrasts. In the first place, however, 
we must bear in mind that we are speaking of the data of 
aesthetic, and a clear statement of positive empirical contrasts 
is no bad thing in a collection of data. And in the second 
place the true distinction of understanding and of reason is 
of course one of degree rather than of kind ; antitheses, as 
we have seen throughout, were laid upon the men of this age ; 
but the attempt to reduce things to a principle is always the 
beginning of reconciliation and unity, and this attempt was 
characteristic of Lessing. His style, then, shows the man of 
the understanding at his very best. His positive knowledge 
in the field of literature is immense ; his skill in disputation 
is extraordinary, and this skill is in fact his great temptation, 
for he cannot resist proving the contradictory of every pro- 
position which an opponent sets up, with a precision which 
is too good to be true. But with all this his style has a 
conversational simplicity and directness, which produces an 
indescribably invigorating effect on the mind, and has some- 
thing of the touch of modern science at its best. He seems 
to say to the reader, " Is it thus or thus ? Here are the 
examples ; come and look at them ; how do they strike you ? 
Is it not thus rather than thus?" Of course, when such a 



1 Encycl Brit., art. " Esthetic." 



224 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



writer does force a distinction, the impression is proportion- 
ately painful. But these cases are rare, though they un- 
questionably occur. 

His peculiar style loses terribly by translation ; but I feel 
bound to reproduce the passage which is the core of the 
Laocoon, both as an example of his reasoning, and as contain- 
ing, in a page of print, his whole essential contribution to the 
classification of the arts. 

44 I should like to attempt to deduce the matter from its 
primary ground. 1 

" I infer thus. If it is true that painting employs in its imita- 
tions quite different media or signs from poetry, the former 
employing shapes and colours in space, the latter articulate 
tones in time ; if it is unquestionable that the signs must have 
a convenient relation to the thing signified, then co-existing 
signs can only express objects which co-exist or whose parts 
co-exist, and successive signs can only express objects which 
are successive, or whose parts are successive. 

44 Objects which co-exist or whose parts co-exist are called 
bodies. Consequently bodies with their visible qualities are 
the proper objects of painting. 

44 Objects which are in succession or whose parts are in 
succession are called actions. Consequently actions are the 
proper objects of poetry. 

" But bodies exist not only in space, but also in time. They 
continue, and in every moment of their continuance may 
appear different, and be in different combinations. Each of 
these momentary appearances and combinations is the effect 
of a preceding one, and is capable of being the cause of a 
succeeding one, and thus, so to speak, the centre of an action. 
Consequently, painting is able also to imitate actions, but only 
by suggestion conveyed through bodies. 

" On the other hand, actions cannot exist apart, but must be 
attached to beings. In as far as these beings are bodies, or 
are regarded as bodies, poetry can depict bodies too, but only 
by suggestion conveyed through actions. 

44 Painting, in its co-existing compositions, can only use a 
single moment of the action, and must therefore choose the 
most pregnant one, from which the preceding and subsequent 
ones become most intelligible. 



1 Laocoon, sect. xvi. 



SUCCESSION AND COEXISTENCE. 



225 



" Just so poetry in its successive imitations can only use 
a single property of bodies, and must therefore select that 
which awakens the most sensuous image of the object in the 
aspect required. 

" Hence flows the rule of the singleness of pictorial epithets, 
and of reserve in description of bodily objects." 

The elements which enter into this brief and pregnant 
argument are collected from very various sources. The 
" convenient relation of signs to the thing signified " is 
probably suggested by Baumgarten. 1 The remark that poetry 
is not adapted for the complete description of visible bodies is 
due to Burke. 2 The observation that* painting can represent 
only a moment of time is found in Lord Kaimes. 3 The 
underlying idea that poetry deals essentially with action is 
drawn no doubt from Aristotle's account of the drama as the 
central species of poetry, and is negatively suggested by " the 
Swiss." The corresponding idea that material or bodily 
beauty consists of pure unity in variety of form is a remini- 
scence of Hogarth and of classical aesthetic, and is negatively 
suggested by Winckelmann's treatment of allegory. But no 
one of Lessing's predecessors had united all these ideas in a 
single page of luminous deduction. 

The value to be ascribed to the abstract distinction thus 
laid down will be evident, I hope, as our history progresses. 
It is enough to say for the present that however it may be 
related to any complete philosophy of the beautiful, the dis- 
tinction by succession and co-existence occupied a place of 
very great importance in our present subject matter " the 
data of modern aesthetic." We now proceed to consider some 
consequences attached by Lessing to this principle. 

Lessing's Atw- S. The term "beauty" is confined by Lessing 
tUd pro°wem d of he to material beauty, and is not treated as the essen- 

ugiiness. t | a i quality of poetry considered as art. Lord 
Kaimes, it may be noticed, confined the term beauty to 
objects of sight ; 4 and we have found the same tendency, far 
narrower than that of Plato or Aristotle, in mediaeval writers 5 
from Plotinus downward. Thus when we find Lessing dis- 
cussing the place of " beauty " in poetry he is only asking how 
far material beauty can effectively be depicted in language, to 



1 See Schasler, i. 351. 2 See p. 205 above. 3 lb. 

4 Elements of Criticism^ i. 177. 5 e.g. Aquinas, see p. 146 above. 

Q 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



which he answers, in accordance with his principle, that it can 
only be either suggested by its effects, or represented as 
charm (Reiz 1 ), which following Burke's account of grace, he 
defines as beauty in motion. I do not know that Lessing has 
framed a general conception of any essential quality shared by 
poetry with the fine arts as a class. He habitually employs 
" Poetry" and "Art" as antithetical terms, a usage common 
to-day, and always indicative of a failure or omission to co- 
ordinate them in theory. Even for his conception of the 
poetical quality common to all species of poetry as such, I 
believe that we should find nothing more explicit than his 
account of the drama, which he with Aristotle regards as 
poetry in its highest concentration. He thus by omission 
rather than of set purpose partially anticipates the question- 
ings of the age of genius as to whether the essential quality 
of modern art is really beauty, and not rather something else — 
the interesting or the significant. And this omission to force 
poetry and formative art into the same theoretical scheme 
enables him to deal freely with the former in spite of his 
abstract conception of the latter. 

Thus he admits the ugly 2 into poetry as a means to the 
comic and the terrible, though the reason for which he does 
so — that the effect of ugliness is weakened by presentation in 
language — destroys in part the significance of his doing so. 

Formative art, on the other hand, he very decidedly limits 
to dealing with those visible objects which produce pleasant 
sensations. Although "as 3 an imitative craft it can express 
ugliness, yet as a fine art it refuses to do so," even as a means 
to the comic and the terrible. The reason assigned for this 
refusal is the persistent force of ugly forms in pictorial presen- 
tation, which causes their disagreeable effect, like that of dis- 
gust (Ekel), to outlast the feeling of comedy or terror to 
which they may have been a means. Thus he rejects, so far 
as concerns the ugly, even Aristotle's plea for the pleasant 
effect of imitations of unpleasant reality, pointing out that the 
ugly in form produces its disagreeable effect quite apart from 
any reference to its real existence, and therefore in represen- 
tation quite as much as in reality. This is the point correla- 
tive to that to which Burke drew attention when he said that 
a tragic reality, regarded apart from real interests, had the 

1 Laocoon, xxi. 2 Laocoon, xxiii. 3 Laocoon, xxiv. 



EXPRESSION. 



227 



same pleasures as its representation. Thus by distinguishing 
between qualities which are the same in representation as in 
reality, and qualities which are not, Lessing really suggests 
the distinction between aesthetic and practical interest. 

If we now pursue our point by asking how far this exclu- 
sion of ugliness betrays an abstract and unindividualised ten- 
dency in Lessing's conception of material beauty, we are met 
by the difficulty of knowing precisely what he included under 
ugliness. We cannot quarrel with a critic for excluding the 
ugly from fine art, i.e. from the beautiful, unless we are sure 
that in doing so he is unaware how wide is the range of the 
concretely beautiful, and how narrow, even if we admit it to 
exist, is that of the insuperably ugly. We can only form a 
judgment of Lessing's position in this respect by examining 
the degree in which he recognises any beauty other than that 
of mere form — ultimately and strictly geometrical beauty as 
analysed by Hogarth. 

In the first part of the Laocoon, before Winckelmann's 
History of Art had appeared, Lessing undoubtedly regards 
expression and truth as falling outside beauty. Not only does 
he regard beauty, thus abstracted, as the law of ancient for- 
mative art, but he stumbles into the terrible pitfall of treating 
it as the exclusive aim of such art. As ancient statues are 
plainly charged with meaning and special feeling, which takes 
shape in tangible " attributes," i.e. objects denoting an indi- 
vidual deity or relation of a deity, Lessing is driven to defend 
his view by distinguishing between the works in which re- 
ligious or conventional tradition fettered the artist, 1 and those 
in which he freely aimed at beauty for beauty's sake. But 
the demand for individual expressiveness in great and serious 
art is not confined to identification of a personage by tangible 
attributes ; and history shows that hazardous to art as the 
didactic spirit is, the mood of great masters in great art- 
periods is nearer to the didactic spirit than to the conscious 
quest for abstract beauty. All beauty, as we have seen, is 
ultimately expressiveness, and its substance and foundation 
falls away if the artist is not mastered by some burden or im- 
port for which he desires to find utterance. Probably it was 
as correcting this distinction of Lessing, that Goethe laid 
down the view that " The highest principle of the ancients 



Laocoon, ix. 



223 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



was the significant, but the highest result of successful treat- 
ment, the beautiful." 1 Beauty comes, that is to say, when a 
significant content is duly handled, but is not a conscious 
and abstract purpose. We shall have to return to this view 
at a later stage. 

Expression, then, and the significant, were prima facie ex- 
cluded by Lessing from the materially beautiful. It is worth 
noting that he regarded the beauty of drapery as something 
very inferior ; the idea of his generation was that Greek 
statues were characteristically nude, and the expressive force 
of the treatment of drapery, as we now know it in the works 
of the great time, was unthought of. " Beauty was the pur- 
pose of art," he exclaims ; ''necessity invented clothes; and 
what has art to do with necessity ?" 2 "I greatly fear that the 
most perfect master in drapery shows by this very skill where 
his weakness lies." 3 When Lessing makes a mistake, he 
makes it thoroughly. 

In the notes for the second part of the Laocoon, written 
after Winckelmann's History of Art had appeared, there is a 
change of phrase as compared with the first part ; but it is 
not a substantive modification. He now admits into beauty 
an element of expression, viz. the " permanent expression," 
which is " not violent," and which " is not only compatible 
with beauty, but introduces more variety into beauty itself." 4 
This view obviously follows Winckelmann's conception of the 
high or grand style of beauty which is united with an expres- 
sion of repose and tranquillity. Winckelmann, as we shall 
see, goes further afield in expression, but Lessing does not 
follow him. 

This is the extreme boundary of the variously expressive, 
significant, or characteristic, not to speak of the ugly, in Les- 
sing' s idea of formative art. Historical painting, for instance, 
he holds to be only justifiable as an excuse for a composition 
of various beautiful forms ; to paint a scene for the sake of its 
import is, he thinks, to make the means into the end. 

Landscape painting is the mere work of eye and hand 
(had Lessing been reading Reynolds' criticism on the Dutch 

1 Hegel, Introd. to s£sth., E. Tr., p. 36. 

2 Laocoon, v. 

3 We must remember that English portrait painters of that day used to 
employ an assistant to paint their draperies. 

4 Laoc., 2, iii. 



UGLINESS IN FORMATIVE ART. 



229 



painters P 1 ), genius has no share in it ; for the inorganic and 
vegetable world are incapable of an ideal. This seems to be 
a further borrowing from the History of Art. The ideal, ac- 
cording to it, 2 is that perfection which is suggested by a com- 
parison of natural examples ; and we must suppose that in the 
inorganic world and the world of plants he sees no such law 
of types and tendencies as to make it possible for a more per- 
fect form to be suggested for them by the exercise of the 
intelligence on their given structure. "The highest bodily 
beauty exists only in man, and in him only because of the 
ideal," 3 i.e. I presume, because of his marked unity and co- 
herence as a organism, which enables a partial defect to be 
corrected by a suggestion drawn from another example, 
whereas, of two mountain shapes, who can say which is the 
right one? "There is no ideal of that in which Nature has 
proposed to herself nothing definite." 4 

We may conclude this part of the examination of Lessing's 
views with his amazing question, " Would it not have been 
better if oil painting had never been invented ?" 5 

After this we need ask no further questions about Lessing's 
general attitude towards ugliness in formative art. His notion 
of material beauty was fundamentally that of formal, geome- 
trical, or decorative beauty, and even his selection of the 
human form as the type of the beautiful is scarcely to be justi- 
fied out of his aesthetic theory ; for what is the human form 
if it expresses no human qualities ? 

e. In one point, however, modern feeling has 

A point in which , . i • 1 T • » i •• 11 1 

his classicism was sympathised with Lessing s classicism, although 
justified. ; t w jjj never cease to feel a certain attraction in 
the quaint horrors of mediaeval art. The Greeks, Lessing 
had maintained in the Laocoon, 6 and even their poets, had 
never portrayed death under the image of a skeleton, in the 
manner of mediaeval and contemporary artists, but rather, in 
agreement with Homer, as the twin brother of sleep. This 
assertion drew upon him an attack to which he replied in 
1769 with the short treatise, How the Ancients Represented 

1 Idler, No. 79. See Ruskin, Modem Painters, "On the Grand Style." 

2 Winckelmann, Gesch. d. bildenden Kunst d. Alten, iv. 2. 35. 

3 Laoc, 2. ii. 

4 Laoc, 2. iv. 

5 Lessing's Leben, ii. 57. 

6 Laoc., xi. note. 



230 



HISTORY OF AESTHETIC. 



Death. In this he identified the common monumental 
figure, resembling an Amor but leaning on a reversed torch, 
as the normal image of death among the Greeks, and found 
another explanation of the antique skeleton figures, whose 
existence had been alleged as an argument against him. The 
sane though sympathetic manner in which he treats the whole 
subject — one of those in which romantic sentiment compares 
least favourably with the cheerful calm of the ancients — was 
perhaps the first simple and popular rapprochement between 
genuine Greek feeling and the profound convictions of modern 
life ; and in this respect anticipated the dawn of a new era in 
which Greek art and intelligence were felt to possess a real 
message for humanity. It was this work, no doubt, that 
stirred Schiller to sing in the "Gotter Griechenlands r" 

" Damals 1 trat kein grassliches Gerippe 
Vor das Bett des Sterbenden. Ein Kuss 
Nahm das letzte Leben von der Lippe, 
Seine Fackel senkt' ein Genius." 

Lessmg's Theory £ We have sufficiently seen that from the time 
of tue Drama. o r Corneille to that of Gottsched theories of 
poetry appealing to the authority of Aristotle were common 
both in France and Germany. Lessing stands within this 
tradition which is modified in his case by peculiar circum- 
stances. 

To begin with, the pseudo-classical tradition itself had at 
this time reached a critical point. By invading Germany, it 
had suggested, even in Gottsched's hands, the idea of a 
national drama. And while making this suggestion, it had 
revealed that its own work was done. Voltaire, 2 its most 
decided partisan, spoke with curious candour of the languor 
and rigidity of the French drama. The form generated by 
classicism had become fixed, and had no fecundity. The 
German genius, when awakened by its means, could not long 
be content with it. Still less was this possible when, being 
essentially an appeal to Csesar, the classical tradition was at 
length brought before his judgment-seat ; when the "ancients" 
whose supposed authority had warranted such strange things 
were produced in broad daylight as the touchstone of poetry, 



" In those days no gruesome skeleton approached the bed of the dying. 
A kiss received the last life from the lips, and a Genius reversed his torch." 
2 Quoted in Hamburgische Dramaturgic, ii. 194. 



GERMANY AND ENGLAND. 



2 3 T 



by a genuine scholar with real poetical sympathy. For 
Lessing is the first popular writer among the moderns who 
knew and loved Homer and Sophocles as a cultivated man of 
letters knows and loves them to-day. The germs of the 
comparison in question lay in the whole history and tendency 
of the Renaissance and the subsequent age. It was impos- 
sible that the world should go on for ever talking about the 
ancients without caring to know what the greatest of them 
was like ; and Lessing happened to be the first man who had 
the critical genius necessary to make this plain. The first 
Renaissance was Latin ; the second was Greek ; and Lessing 
in one craft, like Winckelmann in another, opened the way 
from the first to the second. 

But, in the next place, the French classical tradition was 
confronted in Germany not only by the true spirit of antiquity 
which it had aroused, because it was "classical," but by the 
spirit of intellectual kinship between England and Germany, 
which it aroused because it was French. The Germans were 
beginning to feel their affinity with the English mind and 
speech, and working backwards from the nearer to the more 
remote, according to the principle which we have so often 
observed, they first laid hold on writers contemporary or 
nearly so 1 — thus Gottsched on the Spectator and xAddison's 
Cato, the Swiss on Thomson, Young and Milton, and then, 
in Lessing's generation, they traced the same affinity back 
to Shakespeare. It would be a crude account of Lessing's 
theory, but not wholly a false one, to say that his heart was 
set on proving Shakespeare, and not Racine, to be correct 
according to Sophocles and Aristotle. His synthesis of the 
true classical and the romantic drama owed much to the 
collision of the French and German mind, which expressed 
itself in his almost personal hostility to Gottsched and 
Voltaire. 

And thirdly we have to observe that Lessing lived at a 
time 2 when the dramatic forms were being modified, and the 
novel of family life was beginning to exert an entirely new 
influence. As regards this modification of dramatic species, 
it is simplest to quote Lessing's own words. 3 " I desire to 



1 Lessing's Lebni, i. 279. 

2 Lessing's Lebcn, i. 294, ft 

3 Lessing's Leben, i. 294. 



232 



HISTORY OF /ESTHETIC. 



speak of the changes which in our time have been made in 
dramatic poetry. Neither comedy nor tragedy has been 
spared. The former has been raised several degrees, and the 
latter lowered in the same measure. In the former case it 
was thought that the world had had enough of laughing at 
the comic play and hissing ridiculous vices ; and so the fancy 
suggested itself, to l et thi g yorld at last have its turn at weep- 
ing even in comedyj^JHKnd a noble entertainment in tranquil 
virtues. . In tragedy again it was held unreasonable that no one 
but sovereigns and persc^HBf rank jjkould be capable of awak- 
ing our pity and terror ; so middle-class neroes were sought 
out, and the tragic buskin bucklSHK them, whereas before 
the only object had been to make them laughable. The for- 
mer change created what its partisans call the pathetic, and 
its antagonists the crying comedy. From the second there 
arose bourgeois (middle class) tragedy." " The former change 
was made by the French, 1 the latter by the English. I should 
almost venture to say that both of them arose from the pecu- 
liar disposition of these peoples. The Frenchman is a creature 
that always desires to appear greater than he is. The English- 
man is one who likes to pull down everything great to his own 
level. The former disliked to see himself always represented 
on the comic side ; a secret ambition drove him to show 
persons like himself in a noble light. The latter found it 
vexatious to give so much precedence to crowned heads ; he 
thought he could feel that violent passions and sublime 
thoughts belonged no more to them than to one of his own 
rank." 

Lessing's early tragedy, Miss Sara Sampson, which was 
warmly welcomed in the J T ournal etranger for 1761, probably 
by Diderot, 2 was the first German "middle-class tragedy," 
and reveals the influence under which it was composed by 
the fact 3 that its motives are drawn from The Merchant of 
London — the first English middle-class tragedy, — and from 
Clarissa Harlowe, the first novel of family life, which intro- 
duced the poetry of the family to modern Europe. In one way 
or another, though in the case of comedy not in identical de- 
scent from the "Comedie larmoyante," the serious non-tragic 

1 e.g. Nivelle de la Chaussee, about 1740. For an account of the move- 
ment see Lessing's Leben, i. 291. 

2 Lessing's Leben, i. 467. 

3 Cf. i. 305. 



THEORY OF TRAGEDY. 



233 



drama and the middle-class tragedy were continued by Lessing 
himself and by Diderot. Lessing calls his Emilia Galotti a 
''middle-class Virginia," 1 — "middle-class," not in contrast to 
Livy's story, but in contrast to the habitual treatment of 
the same subject on the French stage. And these two forms 
insensibly shade off into the novel-like mixed drama of real 
life with which we are familiar to-dji|j^^\yh ether any good 
can come of this movement in the future from the standpoint 
of serious dramatic art, appears problematic ; but this appear- 
ance arises from the general difficulp^attaching to dramatic 
art as such, and not from the abandonment of a forced dis- 
tinction between tragedy artlMWnedy. For the approximation 
between the two, not formally recognised before the time of 
which we are writing, was really a matter of older date. 
Goethe called Moliere's Misanthrope a tragedy, 2 and this 
play is taken as the earliest modern example of serious 
comedy by the first theoretical writer on the subject, about 
1 740. And we all know what Shakespearian comedy is at its 
most serious points ; we can hardly say whether Measure 
for Measure, and Much Ado about Nothing, are serious 
comedies or tragedies with happy endings. 

Thus it was quite clear that if the theory of tragedy was to 
have a real bearing for romantic poetry it must in some degree 
be widened, and shown not to depend on the absolute distinc- 
tion of the two sides of life which appeared to be presupposed 
both in practice of the ancients, and in Aristotle's history of 
the drama and theory of tragedy. 

The problem through which more particularly the above 
influences— the serious study of antiquity, the national or racial 
spirit opposed to a foreign tradition, and the modification of 
the distinction between dramatic species — acted on Lessing s 
formal aesthetic criticism is that of the interpretation to be placed 
on Aristotle's account of the tragic emotions, and the estimate, 
consequent on this interpretation, of his ideas concerning the 
character of the true tragic hero. 



1 He took the plot from the story of Virginia, omitting the political back- 
ground, intending thereby to isolate and purify the tragic motive. I imagine 
most readers will feel that the story is thus altogether spoilt, that outlook into 
1 larger life which we get even in Romeo and Juliet, through the healing of 
the feud, being here entirely closed. Lessing's Leben, ii. 309 ff. 

2 Lessing's Leben, i. 294-5. 



234 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



For as to the fundamental condition of the drama, its uni 
the artificial demands of the pseudo-classical school fall ir 
their places at once when Lessing points out that the o: 
unity which is either fundamental in itself or essentia 
demanded by Aristotle, is the unity of action, and that i 
others, so far as necessary, are mere corollaries from tl 
made more important in the ancient world by the presei 
of the Chorus. 1 This latter remark, it will be remember 
had already been made by Lord Kaimes. This view of 
unities is in itself the simplest case of the reconciliation 
tween ancient theory and modern romantic practice. 

Aristotle's account of the tragic emotions, of their effect 
the mind, and of the character therefore required for a h 
of tragedy, have been briefly explained in dealing with A 
totle's views at first hand. 

But this appears to be the right place to point out tr 
relation to the development of aesthetic criticism in mod 
times. 

The paradox of Lessing's position is this : he conte: 
that Aristotle's analysis of tragedy essentially justifies 
romantic drama. But his first duty as an interpreter 
Aristotle is to convict Corneille and similar writers of hav 
understood him not too narrowly, but too loosely. It is i 
therefore, through what what we might call the surface 
tension assigned to Aristotle's ideas, but by tracing them dc 
to their root in human nature, that first Lessing, and tl 
Bernays — who is to Lessing as the latter to Corneille — y 
able to maintain their essential value for poetry as we unc 
stand it. 

For us, then, the question of Aristotle's meaning in sel( 
ing pity and fear as the special emotions of tragedy, is one 
the same class which was described in general terms when 
spoke of his views. Throwing aside all minutiae, we n 
state it thus on its merits. Tragedy, we find in his definiti 
affects the mind in a certain way, "by means of pity and fe; 
Are these terms employed currente calamo, to indicate 
first samples that come to hand, and, of course, as the fi 
the chief and most striking samples, of the various emoti< 
which are aroused by the spectacle of any serious and cc 
plete piece of human history ; or is there a precise system; 



1 Lessing's Lcben, ii. 168. 



PITY AND FEAR. 



235 



intention in the exclusiveness with which these two and no 
others are adduced, and an essential connection between the 
one and the other ? How far are we dealing with a naive 
though acute observation, and how far with a systematic 
analysis conjoined with a general theory of serious poetry ? 
Corneille, to judge from his comments, must have adopted 
the former view, and thus. he easily widens the definition by 
laxity and on the surface. For we saw 1 that his aim in his 
theoretical writing was the same as that of Lessing in the 
Dramaturgies to reconcile modern beauties with ancient rules. 
Pity and fear, he says in effect, are not to be taken as essen- 
tially connected ; they are feelings either of which by itself 
may form the interest of a tragedy, and there may be others 
besides which Aristotle did not happen to notice, such as 
admiration, so that his account of the tragic emotions is casual 
and partial, and his exclusion of perfect and monstrous char- 
acters depended merely on his not having noticed that pity 
could be successfully aroused by the one, and fear by the other. 
His definition, in short, is taken as empirically descriptive ; 
and so with a little good-will it can be extended to include 
even the saints and monsters of Corneille's plays. 

Now Lessing, to whom Bernays, intent upon the " puri- 
fication " controversy, does less than justice as regards the 
whole matter, brings to bear on the subject, and, as he claims, 
almost for the first time, the reciprocal definitions of pity and 
fear from the Rhetoric. His earlier view, 2 however, rejects 
the exclusive interdependence of pity and fear as erroneous, 
and is thus markedly more in harmony with Corneille than 
that of the Dramaturgic. But he then makes, I feel bound to 
contend, the great step on which the later and more subtle 
theory both of Lessing himself and also of Bernays, is 
founded. For he substitutes Burke's " sympathy," the Ger- 
man " Mitleid," on which Lessing even plays by calling it 
"Mitleiden" (which merely means sharing the feeling or suffer- 
ing of another, and does not necessarily indicate a specific 
emotion attached to so doing), for the perfectly definite Greek 
term eXeog, " compassion" or "pity." Thus there is dragged 
in the whole modern or romantic conception, so powerfully 
developed by Bernays, of the widening of the individual self 
into the great self of humanity. 



1 Page 197, above. 2 Lessing's Leben, i. 363, a letter to Nicolai before 1758. 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



In the Dramaturgies written some ten years later, 2 when 
Lessing, as critic to the Hamburg theatre, was doing his best 
to aid the creation of a ''national drama" for Germany, he 
accepts the exclusive and essential connection of pity and fear 
as instruments of tragic effect, and does not attempt to extend 
the import of these expressions so as to include analogous 
emotion, except in as far as they describe the object-matter of 
the tragic purification as opposed to its instruments. There- 
fore his view comes to be essentially that of Bernays, that 
Aristotle intends to insist on the essential interconnection of 
sympathy and fear, in the sense that our feeling of a common 
nature and possibilities shared by ourself and the person in 
the drama awakens in us the thought of our own participation 
in that human destiny which can do such things as we see. 

It is plain that in this exposition width of application is not 
obtained by a laxity like that of Corneille, but by confining 
the definition more strictly to the emotions which Aristotle 
named, and then interpreting these emotions with a larger and 
deeper reference to human nature. 

And so in Bernays himself, who in his turn condemns 
Lessing for laxity, we find the tragic emotions traced so deep 
into the roots of human nature that no serious art whatever 
need fall outside their province. I quote a characteristic 
sentence: 3 "It is only when the actual [material, external] 
fear operates indirectly through sympathy with a person, that 
the process of purgation can take place in the spectator's 
mind, by the individual self being enlarged into the self of all 
humanity, and so coming face to face with the terribly sublime 
laws of the universe and their incomprehensible power, which 
envelops mankind, and being penetrated by that sort of fear 
which as an ecstatic shudder in presence of the universe 
[" dem All "] is pleasurable in the highest way and without 
disturbance." It is clear that while professing to remain 
within the Aristotelian theory of tragedy, we have here 
arrived at a generalised conception of tragic motive which is 
applicable to any serious portrayal of life however romantic, 
however formless, however free from external collision or 
catastrophe. Not only Shakespeare's tragedy and serious 
comedy, but the Cenci and Vanity Fair (although it is called 



1 II. Sect. 65. 2 1767-8. 

3 Bernays, Ztvei Abhandlungen, etc., Berlin, 1880, p. 74. 



MEANING OF "PITY." 



237 



"a novel without a hero") and La Cousine Bette are easily 
and naturally included within such a doctrine. It may indeed 
be admitted to be a development inherent in Aristotle's theory, 
i to which the strict interdependence of pity and fear, known 
from the Rhetoric, undoubtedly gives a systematic value not 
evident from the words preserved in the Poetic. Yet if we 
are asked how far it represents Aristotle's meaning, I think 
we can but answer, as we have answered in analogous cases, 1 
that his actual meaning lies somewhere between these two 
extremes of naive observation and idealistic world-theory. 
Of the two, I confess that I believe it to have approximated 
more nearly to the former. It is a far cry from e'Aeo? to 
" Mitleid," and from " Mitleid" to " Mit-leiden " ; and so it is 
from (pofiog to the overwhelming sense of law in the universe. 

The characters demanded by Aristotle for the persons of a 
tragedy strengthen this opinion. To an unbiassed reader his 
treatment of this point must seem thoroughly naive, It is not 
that he demands for the hero mere human nature, so that 
our own human nature may feel itself implicated in his mis- 
fortunes ; his idea of the qualities which have power to evoke 
our sympathy and our fear is narrowly confined to unmerited 
suffering and to an average moral disposition, The concep- 
tion of greatness, whether in evil or in good, does not present 
itself to his mind. Lessing has not, I think, treated Shake- 
peare's Richard III. in connection with his Aristotelian 
theorem ; and I cannot imagine that in this instance he 
could have made good his usual thesis. But if Aristotle had 
construed his own theory as freely as Bernays or even Lessing 
construes it for him, the deeper manifestations of individual 
character and its collisions with necessity would have been 
more prominent in his analysis of a tragic plot. 

On the question of "purification" or rather "purgation," 
which has been treated in the chapter on Aristotle, there 
seems to be no doubt whatever that Bernays is strictly in the 
right, and that he is thoroughly justified in his ridicule of the 
notion that tragedy was to transform the passions into " vir- 
tuous capacities," ' L and of the consequent application to them 
of the misapprehended doctrine of the mean. Here we see 
how Lessing stands between the earlier and the later moderns, 



1 See above, p. 73. 

2 " Tugendhafte Fertigkeiten," Dramaturgic, I.e. 



HISTORY OF AESTHETIC. 



and we feel that his presupposition of the moral aim of poetry, 1 
though most perfectly guarded against the suggestion of an 
abstract didactic purpose, is painful to our consciousness 
to-day. 

The idea which lies at the root of the Laocoon and of the 
Dramaturgic, that poetry deals only with action, seemed to 
Herder to involve a massacre among poets which none but 
Homer and the dramatists could survive. For lyrical poetry 
Lessing had certainly little feeling ; yet " action," taken in 
the widest sense, according to the definition which forms the 
core of the Laocoon, might include the movement of emo- 
tion in a human heart. 

But however this might be, it was worth while to run the 
hazard of a temporary onesidedness of appreciation, for the 
sake of wholly freeing poetic art from such narrow laws as 
those which Lessing understood to be the laws of material 
beauty, and assigning to it the wide subject-matter of human 
life in all its variations from the comic to the terrible. This 
conception, culminating in the importance assigned to the 
drama, and supported by a profound enthusiasm for Shake- 
speare and for the Greeks, stamped itself unmistakably upon 
the poetry 2 and also upon the philosophy of the next gener- 
ation in Germany. 

1 Dramaturgie, ii. 77. 

2 As in the conception of death, so in the estimate of dramatic value, 
Schiller's poetry follows Lessing's criticism. The lines addressed by Schiller 
to Goethe on the occasion of Voltaire's Mahomet being put on the stage at 
Weimar are of great significance in this respect. I quote two stanzas : 

Einheim'scher Kunst ist dieser Schauplatz eigen, 
Hier wird nicht fremden Gotzen mehr gedient ; 
Wir konnen muthig einen Lorbeer zeigen, 
Der auf dem deutschen Pindus selbst gegriint. 
Selbst in der Kiinste Heiligthum zu steigen, 
Hat sich der deutsche Genius erkiihnt, 
Und auf der Spur des Griechen und des Britten 
Ist er dem bessern Ruhme nachgeschritten. 

Nicht Muster zwar darf uns der Franke werden ! 
Aus seiner Kunst spricht kein lebend'ger Geist ; 
Des falschen Anstands prunkende Geberden 
Verschmaht der Sinn, der nur das Wahre preist ! 
Ein Fiihrer nur zum Bessern soil er werden, 
Er komme, wie ein abgeschiedner Geist, 
Zu reinigen die oft entweihte Scene 
Zum wiird'gen Sitz der alten Melpomene. 



WORK OF WINCKELMANN. 



239 



And if its actual outcome in the drama of Lessing himself 
and of Schiller and his contemporaries is of smaller permanent 
value for the stage than appeared probable at first, and if we 
even find a certain unreality in the supremacy which aesthetic, 
after Lessing's example, still assigns to dramatic form in an 
age when its vitality seems doubtful, yet in the preparation of 
data for modern aesthetic science there has been no much more 
potent influence than this co-ordination of the more compar- 
able poetic forms of the antique and the modern world. For 
it involves ipso facto a combination of the more reserved and 
more exuberant, the more abstract and more individual kinds 
of utterance as alike expressions of human life and passion. 

What Lessing was thus doing for poetry it was the task of 
Winckelmann to do for formative art, in which Lessing had 
not even taken the trouble to distinguish painting from 
sculpture. 1 

vi. Winckelmann (171 7-1 768) is now a mere 
name to most English students and to many of 
his own countrymen. This is the inevitable result of the pecu- 
liar nature of his services to aesthetic. Just because his work 
was fertile in its principles, it has grown in the hands of 
his successors, and there is nothing which we can now learn 
from him about the Greek spirit and history, and extant 
sculptures, so well as from Hegel and Goethe, Grote and 
Curtius, Overbeck and Murray. His style, though clear and 
striking, cannot compensate the modern reader for the tedium 
of lengthy discussions upon particular statues and parts of 
statues, in which the great works that mould our judgment 
are not taken account of. Yet Mr. Pater's delightful essay 2 
may, it is to be hoped, sustain among English writers a cer- 
tain permanent interest in the man whose ideas struck root in 
the minds of Schiller and Goethe, Hegel and Schelling, and 
have in an incalculable degree contributed to the human and 
sympathetic spirit which marks the historical and archaeological 
researches of to-day. 

The characteristics by which he produced the effect which 



1 The influence of casual circumstances is such that I hardly think it too 
audacious to suggest that Lessing's carelessness in taking his first title from a 
group in marble for a work whose second title mentions painting 2& its subject, 
was connected with the fact, that he had to judge of sculpture chiefly or solely 
from drawings and engravings. 

2 In The Renaissance, by Walter Pater : Macmillan & Co. 



240 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



I have thus ascribed to him may be summed up under four 
heads. 

a. The sense of real contact with the human mind in the 
study of workmanship. 

/3. The extension of this sense into an appreciation of 
organic development in art correlative to that in social and 
political conditions. 

7. The consequent recognition of various phases of ex- 
pressiveness within the beauty of plastic art. 

S. The open admission of conflicting claims on behalf of 
formal beauty and of expression, and their partial reconcili- 
ation. 

f eiin for Art a ' ^ ma X seem a strange comparison to set the 
as Human name of Winckelmann beside that of Bacon. But 
production. nQ Qne can reac j constant diatribes of the 

former against mere "book-learning," 1 or against the work 
of "Scribes," 2 in comparison with the knowledge of the 
educated eye, without feeling their motive to be fundamen- 
tally the same as that of Bacon, the eagerness for contact with 
reality at first hand. 3 Thus " research and insight into art 
we look for in vain in the great costly works descriptive of 
ancient statues, which have as yet been published. The 
description of a statue ought to demonstrate the cause of its 
beauty, and point out the individuality in the style of its art; 

but where is it taught in what the beauty of a statue 
consists, and what scribe has looked at it with an artist's eye ?" 
He contends that it is hopeless to judge adequately of statues 
from drawings and engravings, and concludes that it is not 
feasible to write anything of value upon ancient art except at 
Rome, then the great storehouse of antiquities. Rome was to 
him what external nature was to Bacon. You cannot qualify 
as a judge of art by spending a mere month at Rome, he is 
always repeating, in allusion to some countrymen of his who 
had made no longer stay. Or again : 

" How has it happened, 4 whereas profound treatises have 
appeared in all other sciences, that the rationale of art and of 
beauty has been so little enquired into ? Reader ! the fault 



1 " Belesenheit " — a curiously expressive term of disparagement. 

2 " Scribenten." 

3 Gesch. d. Bildenden Kunst^ Introd. ii. 

4 Geschichte^ iv. 2. 5. 



BACON AND WINCKELMANN. 



2 4 1 



lies in our innate indolence as regards thinking for ourselves, 
and in the wisdom of the schools. For on the one hand the 
ancient works of art have been regarded as beauties to the 
enjoyment of which we cannot hope to attain, and which 
therefore readily warm the imagination of a few, but do not 
penetrate the soul, and antiquities have only given occasion 
for shooting the rubbish of book-learning, but have afforded 
no nourishment or hardly any to the reason. On the other 
hand again, since philosophy 1 has chiefly been practised and 
taught by such as, through reading their dryasdust prede- 
cessors therein, are forced to leave little room for feeling, and 
cover it up, so to speak, with a hard skin, we have been led 
through a labyrinth of metaphysical subtleties and circumlocu- 
tions which after all have chiefly served to excogitate huge 
books and sicken the understanding." 

The appeal to reason, feeling and understanding within the 
same page is characteristic of VVinckelmann, whose apparent 
laxity of terminology, often amounting to absolute self-contra- 
diction, indicates not merely a neglect of theoretical refine- 
ment, but also a genuine concreteness of thought. 

Plainly we have in such passages as the above, which might 
be endlessly multiplied, the same craving of which Bacon is 
so eloquent an exponent, the craving for an escape from the 
world of books and reflection into that of direct sensuous 
observation, involving probably a consciousness that human 
faculties demand other nutrition and exercise than that which 
a mere literary medium can supply: " Hardly any scribe can 
penetrate the inmost essence of art." 2 

The difference between the two revivals is that the observa- 
tion of which Winckelmann speaks is directed not to natural 
nature, except in human beings, to whose beauty he is exceed- 
ingly sensitive, but to artificial nature, which though material 
is yet the work and utterance of the mind. Inevitably there- 
fore this later return to nature besides educating the perception 
of the beautiful, formed a bridge from physical and mathema- 
tical science to the anthropological and philosophical sciences. 
How deeply Winckelmann realised this aspect of his re- 
searches as grasping a new province of life, in the direct 
significance of which, however trivial its data may appear, 
mind answers to mind across the ages, may be indicated by 



1 Weltweisheit. 



2 Geschichte^ Introd. ii. 

R 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



one more quotation. 1 " Even in this study (of Greek coins) 
we shall not lose ourselves in trivialities, if antiquities are 
regarded as the works of men whose minds were higher and 
more masculine than ours ; and this recognition has power, in 
conducting such a research, to exalt us above ourselves and 
above our age. A thinking soul cannot busy itself with low 
ideas on the shore of the broad sea ; the immeasurable pros- 
pect widens the limits of the mind, which at first appears to 
lose itself, but then returns to us greater than before." 

I do not know that the self-assertive reaction of the mind 
which constitutes the feeling of the Sublime had been thus 
concisely described before these words were written (1766), 
although many suggestions of the idea are to be found in 
Burke. However this may be, it is certain that the fullest 
theory of art is approached in proportion as we recognise that 
the work is the expression of the workman's life. 
True sense of a Consequent upon this recognition is the 

History of Art. conception of art as something that has a history 
and phases of its own — a growth and a decline — correspond- 
ing to and rooted in the history and conditions of peoples. 
This organic standpoint in relation to art Goethe emphatically 
ascribes to Winckelmann, 2 and although the ideas of concrete 
history were in the air, and should not be hastily credited to 
any one man, yet undoubtedly we find in him more than one 
of the suggestions which have helped to make the greatness 
of later students of antiquity. Let us take for example 
his conception of history 3 as a la-ropla, a research and a 
system, not a chronicle. " The history of Art aims at 
expounding its origin, growth, change, and fall, together 
with the diverse styles of peoples, ages, and artists, and at 
demonstrating this, as far as possible, from the extant works 
of antiquity." This attempt to trace a development extend- 
ing through long ages in its essential causes and connection 
was, he affirmed, a new thing in the literature of art. I am 
very much inclined to think, that, but for the great conception 
of Scaliger, 4 it was a new thing in the science of history. 



1 Gesch., Introd. xxiii. 

2 Winckelmann u. sein Jahrh. 

3 Gesch., Einleitung i. ii. 

4 See p. 189 above. For suggestions of it in ancient writers see Goethe, 
Winckelmann u. sein Jahrhnndert. 



ART AND ITS CONDITIONS. 



243 



Among special points of historical significance which he 
treats in conformity with this idea I may mention four. 

First, he observes that works of art are in their first begin- 
nings all formless and all alike, just as are the seeds of 
different plants. 1 

Secondly, this acute observation enabled him to understand, 
in spite of appearances to the contrary, that Greek art was 
an independent development, not borrowed from oriental 
nations. This view maintains itself on the whole, through 
many vicissitudes, at the present day. It is admitted that in 
early times many technical processes, many modes of decora- 
tive ornamentation, and even certain detached phases of 
style such as that shown in the lions of Mycenae, were intro- 
duced by aliens or imitated from their work. But as regards 
the archaic sculptures which belong to the Greek develop- 
ment proper, it appears to be agreed that their "Egyptian" 
appearance indicates no foreign connection, but is simply a 
result of a superficial similarity of treatment in the early art 
of different countries. 

The two further points may be introduced in Winckel- 
mann's own words. " The cause 2 and reason of the eminence 
which art attained among the Greeks is in part to be ascribed 
to the influence of the climate, in part to their polity and 
government, and the mode of thought formed by it." 

Thirdly, then, in speaking of the climate 3 he follows up the 
idea which is referred to both by Plato and Aristotle, proba- 
bly borrowing from Herodotus, 4 that Greece occupies a 
medium position between Europe and Asia in climate as in 
other respects, and that therefore the nature of the Greeks is 
the finest possible ; and their bodily formation, Winckelmann 
subjoins, corresponded to their fortunate natural conditions. 
He is also well aware of the historical importance of the sub- 
division of Greek territory by physical obstacles, and ascribes 
to this cause the later development of art in Greece as con- 
trasted with Egypt. 5 Those who are familiar with the 
treatment of the climate, position, and physical conformation 
of Greece by modern writers, as for example by Curtius, will 

1 Gesch. i. 1. 1. 

2 lb. iv. 1. 4. 

3 lb. iv. 1. 6. 

4 Hdt. 3. 106. Plato, Republ. 435 E. Ar., Pol. 7. 7. 

5 lb. i. 1. 7. 



244 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



feel the importance of these observations in a writer of the 
eighteenth century. 

And, fourthly, if in speaking of the Greek political system 
he seems blind to its ignoble side, we must yet give him 
credit for the penetration and enthusiasm which enabled him, 
more than a century ego, to appreciate the splendid attributes 
of Hellenic freedom ; and we must remember that owing in 
great measure to him this larger sympathy for Greek life has 
been current in Germany ever since his day, while in Eng- 
land we owe it, as a general influence, to a comparatively 
recent interest awakened by our own political development. 
" In respect of the constitution and government of Greece," 
he says, 1 " freedom is the principal cause of the pre-eminence 
of their art. ... It was freedom, 2 the mother of great events, 
of political changes, and of rivalry among the Greeks, that 
implanted as if at birth the germs of noble and lofty disposi- 
tions ; and just as the prospect of the immeasurable surface 
of the sea, and the beating of the proud waves on the cliffs 
of the shore, enlarges our gaze, and raises the mind above 
mean issues, so, in presence of such great things and persons, 
it was impossible to think ignobly." 

Recognition of 7- * am convinced that Winckelmann's theory 
Phases in G f beauty can only be understood in relation to 
eauy " his history of art. He always uses abstract terms 
in a relative sense, with reference to the character which he 
desires to emphasise in one period as contrasted with another ; 
and thus there arise constant verbal contradictions, which do not 
cause the smallest perplexity to any one who reads the history 
continuously, but which resist every attempt to interpret the 
terms as indicating a system of mutually exclusive qualities. 

He divides Greek art into four periods, 3 suggested by 
Scaliger's periods of Greek poetry. 

In the earliest or ' 'older" style, taken to begin after the 
formless first attempts of art, and lasting to the generation 
before Pheidias, the drawing was emphatic but hard, power- 
ful but without grace ; and the strong expression diminished 
the beauty. 4 This latter clause we might demur to so far as 
concerns the face, in which expression had hardly been at- 
tained. It might have more truth of the figure. Winckel- 
mann remarks the strange minuteness of detail with which the 

1 Gescfc, iv. i. 13. 2 Ib. t iv. 1. 19. 3 Id., viii. 1. 4. 4 Ib n viii. 1. 17. 



THE GRAND STYLE. 



245 



robes are sometimes elaborated in the art of this "older" 
period. 

The second, the "lofty" or "grand" style 1 arose "when 
the time of complete enlightenment and freedom in Greece 
appeared." This style, of which Winckelmann divined rather 
than knew the characteristics, he treated as beginning with 
Pheidias and including the work of Scopas, to whom he attri- 
buted the Niobe group. This group, and a statue of Athene 
then in the Villa Albani, and probably identical with one still 
preserved there, 2 were the only works in Rome, which means 
the only works known to Winckelmann in the marble, that he 
assigned to the period of this style. It is surprising to us that 
he should separate Scopas from Praxiteles, by including- the 
former in this period and the latter in the next ; but of course 
there is a strong tendency when examples are scarce, to extend 
the limits of a division so that it may not be empty. In this 
high or grand style, called " grand" because the artists made 
grandeur and not merely beauty their principal aim, 3 Winckel- 
mann expected to find a certain hardness and angularity, 
though remarking that good drawing often seems hard to 
common critics both ancient and modern. 4 He constantly 
compares the art of this period with that of Raphael. Its char- 
acteristic is a lofty simplicity and unity, like that of an idea 
arising without help of the senses and without the labour of 
construction. 5 These expressions do not contain any theory 
of abstract idealism independent of sense-perception ; they are 
simply intended to reproduce the author s strong feeling of the 
unity and spontaneity of great art. He illustrates them by 
Raphael's alleged power of drawing the outline of a head for 
his most sacred subjects with a single stroke of the pen, that 
needed no subsequent correction. 

It is however idle to deny that Winckelmann, being, as we 
may say, never on his guard, did sometimes lean to the fatal 

1 " Hohe,"' or "grosse Stil," Gesch., viii. 2. 1. 

~ Professor Brunn has kindly informed me that he is of opinion that the 
statue referred to must be Xo. 10 12 now in the Villa Albani. and recognisable 
by having a lion-skin instead of a helmet on the head. "Sie ist in der That," 
he adds, " ein Muster des hohen Stils." I regret that I have never seen this 
statue. 

3 Gesch., viii. 2. 1. 

4 lb., viii. 2. 3. 

5 lb., viii. 2. 4, " Die gleichsam unerschaffene Begriff d. Schonheit/' cf. " d. 
Unbezeichnung," a quality of beauty, iv. 2. 23. 



246 



HISTORY OF AESTHETIC. 



inference that true beauty, such as that of the high style, being 
one in conception, must also be capable of but one expression. 
This is established to demonstration by the fact that he 
assigns their participation in the highest beauty as a reason 
for the Likeness between Niobe and her daughters} 

The next or " beautiful" style, also treated as the style of 
grace, began with Praxiteles and lasted till the first successors 
of Alexander. It is to the preceding style as the painting of 
Guido to that of Raphael. We shall see directly that the 
grace thus spoken of is only a relative and not an absolute 
distinction between this and other periods of art. 

Last came the manner of the imitators, due to the fact that 
the idea of beauty — if he meant the ancient idea of beauty, the 
reason was a good one — was exhausted and could be pushed 
no farther. " Therefore, art, in which as in all the operations 
of nature, there can be no condition of immobility, was forced 
to go back as it did not go forward." It is noteworthy to find 
the author whose principle for modern art is supposed to be 
" the imitation of the Greeks," laying down as an axiom that 
he who follows must always be behind. 2 Art, like philosophy, 
became eclectic, and fastened upon trifles which had been 
thought detrimental to style in its prime. 

Winckelmann's want of sympathy for modern painting has 
been greatly exaggerated. It is wild to say with Schasler 
that he recognised no art but that of the ancient Greeks. 3 On 
the contrary, he recognised the principles of history as of 
general application, and drew the parallel, which though 
obvious is none the less profound, between the four periods of 
Greek and four of Italian art. It is true that he does not 
show appreciation of the Dutch school, but how hard that 
was, and to many minds still is ! Whereas the severity of his 
judgment upon later Italian painting and sculpture is only an 
approximation to the views accepted to-day, and his superi- 
ority in this respect to his age is shown by the dismay of his 
editors, Meyer and Schulze, at his round assertion that bad 
taste set in after Raphael and Michael Angelo, and that 
sculpture came to an end with Michael Angelo and Sanso- 
vino. 4 He even observes that Leonardo and Andrea del 



1 lb., viii. 2. 10. 

2 "Der Nachahmer ist allezeit unter dem Nachgeahmten geblieben," viii. 3. 1. 

3 Schasler, i. 209. 4 G. d. a. A"., iii. 3. 18, with editor's note, 1023. 



CONTRADICTIONS IN WINCKELMANN. 



247 



Sarto, who had had little opportunity for seeing the works of 
the ancients, thought and worked as we must suppose the 
Greek painters to have done. 1 

Whatever isolated expressions we may find in Winckel- 
mann about simple and noble beauty, which seem to confine 
the beautiful to the abstract and the formal, it is plain that a 
writer for whom the beautiful comprehended so many phases 
and types of expressiveness, some of them though different 
yet treated as co-ordinate, cannot conceivably be reckoned 
as narrowing the range of beauty to a single abstract type. 
Before proceeding to discuss his antithesis of beauty and ex- 
pression, I will give other instances of the contradictions 
which are partly reconciled by the re-adaptation of conceptions 
in his mind, as he discovers their relativity. 

The " high " or " grand" style is, as we have seen, not the 
same as the " beautiful " style par excellence, but is distin- 
guished from it much as the "sublime," a term frequently 
applied to the beauty of the grand style, is usually distinguished 
from the " beautiful." Yet the high style is expressly said to 
be the style which aims at " true " beauty. 2 Thus the grand 
or sublime is co-ordinated with the beautiful. 

Again it is the principle of the grand style to express no 
sensibility ; 3 but yet there is not in human nature any state 
free from sensibility or passion, 4 and beauty without expression 
would be without significance. 5 In fact then, the grand style 
is " the expression of a significant and eloquent silence of the 
soul," and is, as Plato said, the most difficult form of expression 
possible ; anything violent is far more easily represented.* 5 
Thus the absence of expression and the highest form of 
expression are really identified, and how natural this meeting 
of extremes is to Winckelmann may be shown by contrasting 
with the reference to Plato just mentioned, a passage in which 
he suggests that, as free from passion, " the idea of the highest 
beauty may seem to be the simplest and easiest thing, 
demanding no inquiry into the passions and- their expres- 
sion." 7 

The conception of grace is first introduced as distinctive of 
the " beautiful " style, 8 but after a short discussion it breaks 
up into species, of which that originally mentioned, the char- 



1 G. d. a. K. v. 3. 28. 2 viii. 2. 10. 3 viii. 2. 11. 4 iv. 2. 24. 
6 v. 3. 4. 6 viii. 2. 11. 7 iv. 2. 23. 8 viii. 2. 9. 



248 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



acteristic of the "beautiful" style, is to the first as the zone of 
Aphrodite to the beauty of Hera 1 — a comparison developed 
by Schiller in Anmuth and Wilrde. A section 2 that shortly 
indicates this expansion of the idea of grace is worth quoting 
at length : — 

" Of the second or more amiable grace [the distinction 
taken is that it is less self-contained, and appeals more con- 
sciously to the spectator, than the first] one may form a con- 
ception from the head of Leucothea in the Capitoline 
Museum, and for a further insight into that wherein the ancient 
artists held grace to consist, one should compare with these 
and similar heads the pictures of Correggio, the painter of 
grace. And then one will be convinced that from this modern 
grace, not seldom affected and frequently exaggerated, to the 
amiable grace of the ancient artists of the beautiful style, is no 
smaller leap than true judges of art will have seen that it is 
from the latter to the sublime grace of the "high" style." 
Here we note again how simple contrast is replaced by 
co-ordination. The author even applies to three types of 
grace the terms tragic, epic, and comic graced The third of 
these hardly coincides with the grace of Correggio, but rather 
applies to children, Fauns, Bacchantes, and such subjects, in 
which beauty is not completely attained. Thus we see how 
wide Winckelmann is prepared to throw his net. 

S. We are partly prepared for Winckelman's 

Conflict between . n r . i • i r i i 

Beauty and idea ot the relation between beauty and expression, 
Expression, froth ^ g enera i form of the co-ordinations 
just mentioned, and by the apparent contradiction of his views 
on the place of expressiveness in the highest beauty. Here, 
just as in the other cases, he starts with a direct antithesis. 
Expression is detrimental to beauty. 4 The two are opposing 
qualities. Beauty is in the first instance the beauty of pure 
form, which appears to mean the beauty of shape as exhibit- 
ing unity in variety, emphasis being laid on the variety, as in 
Hogarth. " The forms of a beautiful body are determined 
by lines which are constantly changing their centre, and con- 
sequently never form part of a circle, but are always elliptical 
in character and share this quality with the contour of Greek 
vases." 5 Expression in art, on the other hand, is the imita- 

1 G. d. a. A'., viii. 2. 16. 2 viii. 2. 18. 3 lb., sect. 20. 4 v. 3. 3 and 4. 
5 iv. 2. 29, see p. 208 above. 



BEAUTY AND EXPRESSION. 



249 



tion of the acting and suffering 1 condition of our soul and 
body, of passions as well as of actions ; in the widest sense it 
includes our action itself, in a narrower sense, merely the play 
of feature and gesture which accompanies the action. It is 
hostile to beauty, because it changes the bodily form in which 
beauty resides, and the greater this change is, the more detri- 
mental is expression to beauty. It does not occur to him as 
possible that expression may modify habitual forms for the 
better even by the standard of mere shape. The first dis- 
tinction as it presents itself to his mind, to be subsequently 
modified, is plainly that of repose as contrasted with motion. 
In the more theoretical books 2 of the History, which deal 
separately with the elements of art, Beauty is treated first, and 
Expression separately, afterwards. 

But in spite of this abrupt antagonism between the two, we 
find, when we turn to the analysis of actual artistic portrayal, 
and to the history proper, that within the limits of beauty even 
in the strictest sense — divine beauty — there falls a great variety 
of types 3 each appropriate to the character and functions of 
the deity represented ; that the style which is called the 
" beautiful "par excellence is compatible with more expression 
than the earlier or grand style, 4 and that the grand style itself 
has not the beauty of a mere vase-outline or geometrical 
pattern, but is beautiful as the expression of a tranquil soul. 5 
And thus, though according to the strict theory of formal 
beauty it would seem to be like pure water, best when most 
flavourless, and so to be an easy and simple matter, needing 
in the artist who is to represent it no knowledge of man nor 
experience of passion, 6 yet really 4k beauty without expression 
would be characterless, expression without beauty unpleasant," 7 
and for the ancient artists beauty "was the tongue on the 
balance of expression " 8 which was thus weighed out with 
extreme nicety, being — for this is plainly the sum of the 
whole — an element at once essential to beauty, and tending to 
destroy it. 

There can be no doubt that as a matter of general theorv 



1 We must not translate " leidenden " by " passive," for the point is that 
signs of being acted on are shown. It more nearly = " in passion." The con- 
nection between " passion " and "passive " is one of the most curious points 
in word-history. 

2 Books iv. and v. 3 Books iv., v., viii. 4 viii. 2. 19. 

5 viii. 2. 11. 6 iv. 2. 23. 7 v. 3. 4. 8 lb. 



25O HISTORY OF AESTHETIC. 



Winckelmann leaves us in this intolerable contradiction, 
which Goethe himself rather acquiesced in than resolved. 
But Winckelmann's distinctive work was that of a historian, 
and it is not hard to see how in the concrete the matter forced 
itself upon his mind. 

He unquestionably started from the antique or abstract 
notion of beauty, as unity and variety manifested in the form, 
that is, the shape, of works belonging to the lesser arts, and 
of the human figure. This theory of beauty does not really 
account for anything more complex than our pleasure in a 
geometrical pattern or the shape of a vase or moulding. It 
is, strictly speaking, inadequate even to the simplest apprecia- 
tion of the human face and figure, and lends itself to the 
confusion, into which Winckelmann in one passage quite 
unquestionably fell, 1 by which there is supposed to be only one 
beautiful form, single and invariable — all reference to indivi- 
duality being excluded — and this is consequently identified 
with the conception of beauty, which, like every intellectual 
conception, is single and self-identical. We are not, however, 
to connect this passing delusion with the constant reference 
to ideal beauty, as though the ideal for him essentially con- 
sisted in this abstract conception mistakenly identified with a 
single invariable shape. On the contrary, the term " ideal " 
always implies in Winckelmann the exercise of educated per- 
ception upon experience, his doctrine being based on the 
ancient notion that supreme beauty could only be attained by 
combining the partial beauties of nature. 2 He knows that 
44 ideal" forms, i.e. forms modified by the observer's mental 
activity, need not be beautiful ; and he thinks 3 that Guido's 
" ideal " archangel, portrayed, according to the artist's account, 
after a mental image superior to experience, is much less 
beautiful than persons whom he has seen in reality, and 
betrays defective observation of nature. Thus the concep- 
tion of ideal beauty does not to tend to narrow his doctrine, 
but to widen it. 

Now his primary tendency was no doubt to identify this 
mere beauty of shape, which implies repose simply because 
motion would involve change of outline, with the beauty or 
sublimity of the grand style, and we see him arguing with 
himself in the famous comparison with pure water 4 whether 



See p. 246 above. 2 iv. 2. 35. 3 lb. 4 See p. 249 above. 



CO-ORDINATE TYPES OF BEAUTY. 



this can really be the case. But looking at the concrete, and 
arguing back from the phases of more pronounced expression, 
he sees that this is impossible, and that the grand style is 
expressive of one state of the soul, if the beautiful style is 
expressive of others. And indeed, if the grand style is 
cognate with formal beauty through its simplicity, the beautiful 
style is so no less through its variety and charm of curvature, 
so that we get the contradictory but intelligible result which 
has been mentioned, viz., that true beauty — the beauty of the 
grand style — falls outside the distinctively beautiful style, while 
the factor hostile to beauty reaches its maximum in the style of 
which beauty is the distinctive attribute. Thus he breaks away 
from the view which would have been the natural conclusion 
from his premisses. He does not find that beauty is in inverse 
ratio to expression ; and he shows conclusively that in the 
concrete the two are never divorced, and that beauty breaks 
up into kinds and types in accordance with the mental content 
from which it issues. Though he fails to reduce the two 
elements to a common denomination, and they remain an- 
tagonistic in theory, he has done all that is necessary, in the 
realm of plastic art, to exhibit that correspondence between 
phases of the beautiful and the development of its content 
which holds a chief place among the data of modern aesthetic. 
It was thus that Winckelmann succeeded " in furnishing the 
mind with a new organ and new methods of study in the 
field of art." 1 This judgment of Hegel appears to be based 
upon that of Goethe, who speaks of his Gewahrzverden der 
Griechischen Kunst (his Finding of Greek Art 2 )-, and it is 
happy for the English reader that for him too, as I have 
already mentioned, the memory of Winckelmann is enshrined 
in a work 3 that belongs to our finest critical literature. 
Data not utilised vii. Our account of the data of modern aesthetic 
by the critics. ma y fa]y c i ose at t hj s point. We have not at- 
tempted to take into our view those phenomena of art which 
had not been drawn into the focus of critical theory. We 
have said little or nothing about painting and music. Except 
through the suggestive paradoxes of Diderot the former of 



1 Hegel, Aesth. Introd., E. Tr. p. 120. 

2 Cf. Goethe, Winckelmann u. sein Jahrhnndert, and Pater, Renaissance) 
Essay on Winckelmann. 

3 Pater's Renaissance. 



2 5 2 



HISTORY OF .'ESTHETIC. 



these distinctively modern arts was thus far hardly recognised 
by criticism as having a separate existence, nor does anything 
in the aesthetic reflection of the eighteenth century before 
Goethe suggest to us that Bach and Handel lived in the first 
half, and Gliick, Haydn, and Mozart in the second half of that 
period. Before theory could deal with what was native and 
familiar, it had to follow the toilsome clue afforded by the 
inheritance of the past, because it had been brought up to 
believe that there alone lay the treasure house of beauty. But 
the treasure was found to be hidden at our own door, and in 
following the clue we have passed from abstract to concrete 
antitheses. Before Lessing and Winckelmann we were in a 
dim half-light of tradition and empty formula, but after their 
labours we are in the bright and populous thoroughfare of 
human life, which binds the ages together. This idea finds 
general expression in Lessing's treatise, On the Education 
of the Human Race (1780). And an antithesis concretely 
conceived is ripe for solution ; and the solution of a pre- 
dominant antithesis carries with it the due organisation of a 
hundred other issues, which could not find their places till 
the main framework was fitted together. Thus music, and 
landscape painting, and Gothic architecture, and lyric poetry, 
all of which were little noted by these who laid ready the 
materials for the building of aesthetic philosophy, soon fell 
into their places when the great master-thinkers came to draw 
the ground plan. 

_ M . . viii. A few facts may be added, by way of con- 

Indications 1 . 1 1 • ■ 11 1 • 1 

of a elusion, to point out now, historically speaking, the 
Transition. were Drou ght face to face with the problem and 
passed into the concrete theory. 

The year 1764, which saw the publication of Winckelmann' s 
History of Ancient Formative Art, saw also the publication 
of Kant's Observations upon the feeling of the Sublime and 
Beautiful. In 1768, the year which Winckelmann did not 
survive, Herder, a youth of twenty-four, dissatisfied with 
Lessing's Literatitrbriefe which were before him, gave voice 1 
to the need for another Winckelmann, who should apply in 
the sphere of Greek poetry and philosophy the new concep- 
tion of organic and scientific history which had been inaugu- 
rated in the field of plastic art; in 1773, Goethe produced 

1 Herder, Fragmente zar DeutscJwi Lite?-atur, Sammlung, 2, c. iv. 



ROMANCE AND NATURALISM. 



253 



Gb'tz von Berlichingen, the issue, monstrous in Lessing's eyes, 
of Lessing's own Shakespearian revolt, and also, more im- 
portant still, the incomparable little essay on the architecture 
of Strasburg Cathedral, which fairly raised the banner at once 
of " Gothic " art and characteristic expression. 1 About 1775 
Diderot's Essay on Painting 2 was written, marking almost the 
end of his long activity as a critic of contemporary painting, 
and beginning with the famous aphorism, Nature is never incor- 
rect. Diderot might be called a preacher of romantic natural- 
ism, as indeed throughout the time of these earlier antitheses, 
the two elements of romance and naturalism, which later sprang 
into polar opposition, formed a single extreme in the contrast 
with classical and mannered formalism ; and it is probable that 
the essential inter-dependence of romance and naturalism, or 
symbolism and imitation, the reason for which has been 
explained in an earlier chapter, 3 has never permitted, and will 
never permit, their opposition to have the fundamental char- 
acter which is sometimes ascribed to it. I imagine, therefore, 
that Diderot's contention that all in Nature is "correct" be- 
cause it is necessary in the economy of the whole, has a pro- 
founder bearing upon art than Goethe is disposed to allow. 
The issue whether beauty is hostile to necessity in principle, 
or only for our imperfect vision of the reasonable, belongs to 
the aesthetic of ugliness, and can only be dealt with in that 
connection. That up to a limit which appears to be capable 
of practically indefinite expansion, the works of natural neces- 
sity have been and are being transferred from the category of 
the ugly to that of the beautiful is a mere matter of every-day 
experience. Whether this practically indefinite expansion is 
theoretically without an end we cannot discuss just now. 

In 1 78 1 there occurred three events of the greatest signifi- 
cance in the history of aesthetic. The death of Lessing 
severed the last link between the old and new, the Latin and 
the Greek Renaissance ; the publication of Schiller's Rduber 
continued the inauguration of the genius-period — a reaction 
which was to Lessing almost as Lessing had been to Gott- 
sched ; and the appearance of the Critique of Pure Reason 



1 Werke, xxv. 1. First published with Herder and Moser in Deutsche n 
Art u. Kunst. 

2 Translated by Goethe in 1805 rather as a contribution to aesthetic history, 
and as a basis for his own comments, than as retaining substantive value. 

3 See p. 158, and reff. 



254 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



began the philosophical revolution which the problem and the 
data of aesthetic were destined to complete by their fusion. 
And when the Kritik- der Ui'theilskraft was produced in 1 790, 
the philosophical problem was solved in the abstract, as we 
shall endeavour to make clear in the following chapter ; and 
this abstract solution only needed a concrete development to 
become both a genuine philosophy of art, and an important 
influence upon future speculation in general. 

Thus Goethe and Schiller, who are of course in one aspect 
immediate descendants of Lessing and Winckelmann, may 
most conveniently be treated after and not before the Kantian 
aesthetic has been considered. Both of them were to some 
extent — Schiller very profoundly — affected by Kant's ideas ; 
and moreover the full weight of aesthetic knowledge and 
expression inherited by them and their contemporaries from 
the movement which I have been attempting to describe, was 
brought to bear on philosophy not before but after Kant had, 
almost independently, formulated the issues of aesthetic. We 
shall therefore be following the true nexus of events by treat- 
ing first of Kant, then of Schiller, Goethe, and others with 
reference to the eventful decade between 1790 and 1800, and 
after that we shall be able without further interruption to follow 
the stream of aesthetic speculation which springs from the 
union of Kant's abstract aesthetic with the appreciation of art 
and workmanship as an utterance of the human spirit and as 
sharing its evolution. 



CHAPTER X. 



KANT THE PROBLEM BROUGHT TO A FOCUS. 

I. The data of modern aesthetic, described in 

His Relation to . 

the Problem the preceding chapter, produced no considerable 
and tne Data. e ff ect U p 0n Kant's philosophy. His work lay 
wholly in the path of metaphysical speculation, and before its 
point of junction with the concrete evolutionary idea. The his- 
tory of thought can show no more dramatic spectacle than that 
of this great intellectual pioneer beating out his track for forty 
years in the wilderness of technical philosophy, and bringing 
his people at last to the entrance upon a new world of free and 
humanizing culture, which, so far as we can tell, he never 
thoroughly made his own. 

We must remember that although Kant published his most 
famous works after the death of Lessing, and therefore long 
after the death of Winckelmann, yet he was born (1724) five 
years earlier than the former and only seven years after the 
latter. The title of his first work on aesthetic, Observations 
on the feeling of the Sublime and Beautiful, seems to show 
that Burke's Essay (1756) had been instrumental in drawing 
his attention to the subject; and its date (1764) being the 
same as that of Winckelmann's " History," and earlier than 
that of the Laocoon, indicates that his aesthetic interest 
had taken its bent before the new renaissance had well 
begun. His great aesthetic treatise of 1790, The Critique 
of the Power of Judgment, follows this same division into the 
Sublime and the Beautiful, and while explicitly referring to 
Burke's Essay indicates no interest whatever in the contem- 
porary movement of archaeology and art-criticism. We trace 
in it indeed here and there an idea drawn from Rousseau, or 
find an observation of De Saussure ; but these are exceptions 
that prove the rule, for, wide as his reading was, Kant pre- 
ferred to rely on facts of nature and humanity freshly observed, 
whether by himself or others, rather than on secondary theory 
dealing with books and art. 



256 HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



His inquiries into the beautiful may thus have assumed their 
immediate form owing to suggestions in Burke and similar 
writers, and could not but show traces of the ideas fermenting 
around him. But the conditions that invested these inquiries 
with supreme importance at this particular crisis were not de- 
rived from preceding or contemporary art-theory, but from 
that movement of general philosophy which I have en- 
deavoured to depict as determining the " problem of modern 
aesthetic." It was after Kant had brought into suggestive 
order the factors of this movement, using as a chief instrument 
in the work the ideas of the beautiful and the sublime, that 
an extraordinarily rapid and fortunate succession of great minds 
re-organised the data of art and learning by the help of his 
conceptions, and thus founded in one of its forms the concrete 
idealism which really governs alike the aesthetic and the meta- 
physic of the nineteenth century. The resolution of the given 
antithesis between the mediaeval and the antique — the mar- 
riage of Faust and Helena — from which there sprang the 
completed modern spirit, was performed in great part inde- 
pendently of philosophy proper, and was taken into the sweep 
of metaphysical speculation at a point subsequent to the com- 
pletion of Kant's system, by which the same antithesis had 
been resolved in other and more abstract forms. 

2. In his lifelong labour for there-organisation 

Place of the & & . 

iEstnetic Problem 01 philosophy, Kant may be said to have aimed at 
m his system, cardinal points, dictated to him by the con- 

verging movements of thought in the focus of which he placed 
himself. First, he desired to justify the conception of a natural 
order ; secondly, the conception of a moral order ; and thirdly, 
the conception of compatibility between the natural and the 
moral order. The first of these problems was imposed upon 
him by Hume, and formed the substance of the Critique of 
Pure Reason ; the second was a legacy from the Wolffian 
school, and was treated in the Critique of Practical Reason ; 
the third necessarily arose out of the relation between the 
other two, emphasised by the distinctively modern recognition, 
which eighteenth century enlightenment exaggerated, that the 
sentient and intelligent individual has indefeasible claims both 
of sense and of rational freedom. And although the formal 
compatibility of nature and reason had been established by 
Kant, as he believed, in the negative demarcation between 
them which the two first Critiques expounded, it was inevitable 



THE " CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON." 



257 



that he should subsequently be led on to suggest some more 
positive conciliation. This attempt was made in the Critique 
of the Power of Judgment, published in 1790, a date to be 
remembered in connection with the remarkable literary history 
of the following decade. 

The import of the two earlier Critiques may be indicated in 
popular language, simply and solely in order to explain Kant's 
relation to aesthetic theory, somewhat as follows. 

When we examine the system of the physical sciences with 
reference to its logical texture, we at once become aware that 
in spite of its immense variety of object- matter it is permeated 
by certain common characteristics which appear inseparable 
from its intellectual existence. Such are, in modern phrase, 
the law 7 of the uniformity of nature in its most formal render- 
ing, and the law of Sufficient Reason with its sub-form the law 
of Causation, not to speak of the more sensuous abstractions 
of space and time. The use of these principles, by whatever 
name we call them, is found to be merely another name for 
the use of our own intelligence and perception, and, apart 
from the theory of mind, we are not in the habit of asking 
questions as to where we get them or by what right we apply 
them. If challenged on the subject to-day we should probably 
attempt to show, resting our demonstration upon the analysis 
of knowledge, that we cannot do the work of science without 
some such principles, and that we find no warrant in experi- 
ence for the notion, which is implied in questioning their 
validity, that some alternative is open to us by which, dis- 
carding them, we might arrive at less artificial elements of 
knowledge. 

Now this mode of argument, which expresses the result on 
our minds of such an attempt as that made by Mill to demon- 
strate the postulates of experience, seems to correspond with 
the substance of the Critique of Pure Reason, when stripped 
of the technical details and qualifications which arose out of 
the peculiar speculative conditions of the time. 

Taken quite strictly, however, such an argument carries 
us but a short way. The vital relation in which it places 
intelligence to the matter of perception is very narrowly 
circumscribed. It leaves us in an intolerable perplexity as 
regards the element of experience over which we have no 
control — the element in physical reality which is undeter- 
mined and unexplained by the formal postulates of intelli- 

s 



258 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



gence. We see that natural knowledge, in as far as it comes 
to us at all, forms itself by necessary processes into a concep- 
tion of parts dependent upon one another in endless succession 
and co-existence. What we do not see is any ground whatever 
for supposing that the natural reality thus brought before our 
minds, a reality which is taken to include our own sentient 
and emotional nature, is in any way bound to continue in 
accord with our intelligence, or in the smallest degree to take 
account of our moral or eudsemonistic requirements. 

In knowledge thus limited to the necessary interconnection 
of parts, within a system not known and not justifiably to be 
divined as a whole, we have the operation of what Kant chose 
to call the Understanding, which we may interpret to our- 
selves by comparing it with the " eye of science," for which 
no catastrophe either moral or material is disorder, so long as 
its factors are taken to be connected according to the law of 
Causation. 1 The Critique of Pure Reason is a demonstration 
that theoretica.1 knowledge is limited to this " Understanding" 
as operative within the sphere of possible perception. The 
whole can be known only in its parts and not as a whole. 
Therefore the Reason, or that aspect of thought in which it 
implies, for every part, a whole to which it must be related 
and in which its import must lie, has no strictly theoretical 
function, and cannot be the source of any theoretical proposi- 
tions. It has no place within perceptive experience, 2 for the 
whole as a whole cannot appear there ; nor outside perceptive 
experience, for how could definite knowledge of the whole 
come into being in a region where there is ex hypothesi no 
perception of the parts ? Ideas of the Reason, therefore, 
that is ideas concerning the nature of the universe as a 
whole, such as those of God and Freedom, are incapable of 
theoretical verification, whether within perceptive experience 
or beyond it. For pure theory gives us a world of natural 



1 See Prof. Huxley {Contemp. Review, February, 1887) quoted and criti- 
cised in the author's Logic, ii. 214. 

2 I omit at this point the "regulative" application of Ideas of Reason to 
knowledge, by which the inquirer is led to look for so much material order in 
the objects of knowledge as may make science possible, though he must not 
assert theoretically that there is such order. This principle is in fact a 
material postulate of knowledge, parallel to Mill's "Uniformity" if inter- 
preted to mean not merely "A is A " but " knowledge is possible," and 
being inserted in the Critique of Pure Reason is a modification of Kant's 
dualism ab i?iitio. 



" CRITIQUE OF THE PRACTICAL REASON." 



259 



necessity, and outside it nothing can be with theoretical 
definiteness affirmed or denied. 

The abstract distinction between the whole and the part in 
thinking being once assumed, this conclusion is inevitable. 
If we ask why the Understanding apart from the Reason did 
not show itself as empty a fiction as the Reason apart from 
the Understanding, the answer is that in approaching any 
system through a study of its parts we insensibly subordinate 
them to a makeshift or imperfect whole, such, for example, as 
the universe taken to be a physical reality endless in space 
and time. Thus we are able to order our experiences pro- 
visionally, and leave out of sight the difficulties which attach 
to their aspect of totality. Hence it has been said by Hegel 
with practical truth, "Understanding without Reason is some- 
thing, Reason without Understanding is nothing." We need 
not plume ourselves to-day on seeing through the impossi- 
bility of Kant's abstraction, until we are quite sure that we 
have ourselves understood how all necessary connection must 
be founded in the relation of part to part within some given 
reality. 

So far then, except for the regulative use of the ideas of 
Reason within experience, we have a purely negative demar- 
cation between the world of natural necessity and the world 
of rational freedom. Plainly, Reason is at work in the con- 
ception of both worlds, but in forms at first sight incom- 
patible. 

In the Critique of the Practical Reason we find the com- 
plementary side of the demarcation. We all know that in 
order to live at all we must assume, whether we profess them 
or not, certain simple articles of faith, say, that food will 
nourish, that language will retain its meaning, that men will 
not turn to tigers without cause or warning, and in short that 
the acts necessary to be done are also possible. From some 
such elementary standpoint we may take a fairly appreciative 
view of Kant's Practical Reason, which has been so ridicu- 
lously parodied. As a being with a will, man cannot avoid 
putting before him certain aims and principles of conduct. 
Now conduct issues out into the world of physical reality, and 
is in fact, as we now recognise, through the human organism, 
in the closest correspondence with that world and its necessi- 
ties. But according to the principles of the former Critique 
we can make no theoretical propositions whatever about the 



26o 



HISTORY OF AESTHETIC. 



possibility or impossibility of realising man's will within the 
world of physical reality, nor, therefore, about the existence 
of God, nor the truth of Freedom and Immortality. Neverthe- 
less these unaffirmed ideas of the Reason, under which it 
envisages the nature of the universe as a whole having a 
unity beyond perceptive experience, are capable of guiding 
the human being in his practical attitude to life. He is not 
to say how, though he may say that their objects are real ; but 
he is to make it his aim to realise life in accordance with them. 
Thus, if we translate the essence of the matter into modern 
terms, we find that the appeal is simply to the mora?l order 
as found to be practically realisable in the moral life. This 
alone — the moral life as a meeting-point of reason and nature 
which displays their compatibility in act — is what we should 
call a reality. Such a view should not be unintelligible to- 
day, for in spite of its self-contradictions it is very widely 
held. Those who, believing in a universe that as a whole is 
in no way relevant to any rational end, nevertheless think it 
practically certain that morality is possible and life, with its 
implied reference to a nobler earthly future, is worth living, 
are in a position to appreciate Kant's doctrine of the Practical 
Reason. 

The separate worlds of Nature and of Freedom were thus 
established on the strength of two distinguishable orders of 
facts — the facts of science and those of the moral life — and all 
proof of their incompatibility was supposed to be rendered 
impossible by the strict negative demarcation between them, 
that is, by a necessity of ignorance. 

It was not likely that such a position would be acquiesced 
in without an attempt to complete it by a reconciliation be- 
tween the two worlds. The need could not be more strik- 
ingly stated than in the following passage from the introduc- 
tion to the Critique of the Power of J udgrnent. 

" There 1 is thus a gulf which we cannot see across between 
the territory of the conception of Nature, that is, the sensuous, 
and the territory of the conception of Freedom, that is, the 
supra-sensuous, so that from the former to the latter (by 
means, that is to say, of the theoretical use of Reason) there 
is no passage possible, just as if they were two different 
worlds of which the former can have no influence on the 



Kritik d. Ui theilskraft, Werke, 4. 14. 



" CRITIQUE OF THE POWER OF JUDGMENT." 



26l 



latter. Nevertheless the latter ought to have an influence 
on the former, that is to say, the conception of Freedom 
ought to realise within the world of sense the aim imposed by 
its laws ; and consequently, Nature must be thought of in 
such a way that the law-abidingness of its form may be com- 
patible at least with the possibility of the ends, imposed by laws 
of freedom, which are to be effected within it. Therefore there 
must after all be a ground of the unity of the supra- sensuous 
which lies at the root of Nature with that which the conception 
of Freedom practically contains — a ground the conception of 
which, although unable to attain cognition of it (the ground) 
either in theory or in practice, and therefore possessing no 
peculiar territory, nevertheless makes possible a transition 
from the mode of thinking dictated by the principles of the 
one world to that dictated by the principles of the other 
world." 

To be the meeting point of these two worlds, the repre- 
sentative of reason in the world of sense, and of sense in the 
world of reason, is the high position which Kant is here 
preparing to assign to the content of the aesthetic and teleo- 
logical judgment. This content coincides, as we shall see, 
with the sublime and beautiful in reality and in art, and the 
products of organic nature. The pre-eminent importance 
thus assigned to real objects in which an idea seems indissol- 
ubly embodied, was the germ from which concrete idealism 
was to spring. 

3. The reasons for finding: the required meet- 

Why the -Esthetic • • . • ^\ • r r * J 

Judgment is the ing-point in the exercise 01 the power of judgment 
^ S ^obie°m tlie soun d very strange in Kant's technical language. 

The power of Judgment, he says, is the connecting 
link between the Understanding and the Reason, as the feeling 
of pleasure and pain is between the faculties of knowledge 
and of desire (will). The power of judgment is reflective, not 
determinant, and prescribes to itself the conception of purpo- 
siveness in nature, as if nature in all its variety had had a 
unity imposed upon it by an Intelligence, such as to conform 
to our cognition. This conformity to our cognition or power 
of apprehension produces when perceived a feeling of pleasure 
wholly distinct from that which belongs to conformity with 
our desires. This feeling of pleasure is the predicate in the 
aesthetic judgment, and being pleasure in the presentation of 
an object by reason of its form only, is universal though sub- 



262 



HISTORY OF AESTHETIC. 



jective. When the predicate is not a feeling of pleasure but 
a relation to the idea of an end, then we have the teleolo- 
gical and not the aesthetic judgment. 

Omitting the question of teleological judgment, we may 
paraphrase this technical exposition as follows. Every judg- 
ment may be regarded as placing parts in relation to a whole. 
Although, if we separate the Understanding and the Reason, 
there cannot but be Judgment in each of them ; yet, in fact, as 
we have seen, this separation except as a matter of degree, is 
pure fiction. What is meant therefore by the intermediacy of 
the power of Judgment between Understanding and Reason 
is merely that all judgment is synthesis, and therefore judg- 
ment par excellence, in its most central types, always has a 
tendency to gather up the relations of parts, which are sup- 
posed to be the sphere of the Understanding, in subordination 
to a unity or totality, which is supposed to correspond to the 
point of view emphasised by " Reason." And such a unity of 
parts undoubtedly shades off by degrees into a working con- 
ception of purposiveness, as is sufficiently shown by consider- 
ing the great predominance of the idea of purpose in the 
determination of the significant names applied to what we call 
" things." It is doubtful if the conception of an individual 
44 thing" would exist apart from organic and artificial products. 
It is natural therefore to give the title of Judgment emphatic- 
ally to the perception of characteristic form in objects, as at 
least a notable case of the synthesis of parts into a whole. 
It is thus that the power of Judgment is taken to be inter- 
mediate between Understanding and Reason, and to assume 
the idea of purposiveness for the inseparable or a priori 
principle that guides its reflections. 

The feeling of pleasure and pain, again, is regarded as a 
connecting link between the faculty of cognition and that of 
will or desire, apparently because it is a characteristic which 
is commonly associated with action or practical interest, and 
when found as mere pleasure and pain, i.e., as free from 
such interest or satisfaction, is regarded as a half-way house 
between action and theory. The discussion at some points 1 
reminds us of Aristotle's reference to the pleasure which we 
feel in the sheer activity of recognition. But Kant means 
more than this. He means that a conformity is brought to 



Einleitung, Sect. vi. 



THE ESTHETIC PARADOXES. 263 



light between the perception of the object and the faculties 
of the subject, such that the subject is harmoniously affected 
in respect of the relation between fancy and understanding. 
We must assume this to mean that the image presented to 
fancy or pictorial perception in some way meets the needs, or 
accommodates itself to the rules of the understanding. Our 
difficulty is here and will be throughout to see how the in- 
dividualities of different beautiful objects are allowed for by 
these formulae. Are different harmonies of fancy and under- 
standing correlative to different types of beauty ? 

Thus aesthetic pleasure combines the characteristics of 
desire and knowledge, as the nature of judgment combines 
in the idea of purposiveness those of the reason (unity) and 
the understanding (diversity or dissociation). This seems to 
be why the " aesthetic judgment " is selected as the guide to 
the required meeting-point of Nature and Freedom, Under- 
standing and Reason, the sensuous and the intelligible. 

The intermediate position of the aesthetic judgment is 
strikingly exhibited in the four paradoxes, corresponding to 
the four heads of categories employed in the Critique of Pure 
Reason, by w T hich Kant determines its essence. We will 
place these paradoxes side \>y side. 

In Quality, the Judgment of Taste is aesthetic ; that is to 
say, the pleasure which forms its predicate, is apart from all 
interest. Interest is defined to be pleasure in the idea of the 
existence of an object. It is contrasted with pleasure in the 
mere presentation or sensuous idea of the object. Thus the 
beautiful is at once sharply distinguished from the pleasant 
and the good, which correspond to the lower and higher forms 
of the appetitive faculty. For in both its forms the appetitive 
faculty involves an " interest." 

In the Quantity and Modality of the judgment of taste the 
beautiful is considered as the object of a pleasure which is 
universal and necessary, but without the intervention of a re- 
flective idea. For this reason the universality and necessity 
are both of them subjective and not objective. I have 
ranked these two points together, though Kant does not, 
because according to modern logic we hardly care to dis- 
tinguish between Quantity and Modality or between Univer- 
sality and Necessity. 

In the Quantity of the judgment beauty is distinguished 
from the pleasant and the good ; from the pleasant by its 



264 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



universality — for we demand agreement in the judgment of 
beauty, though there is no disputing about tastes in food or 
drink — and from the good by the absence of a reflective idea. 
These distinctions are not repeated under the head of Moda- 
lity. The result would plainly be the same. 

In respect of the Relation which the judgment of taste 
implies, the beautiful is the form of purposiveness in an 
object, in as far as this can be perceived without the idea of 
an end. Once more then, the beautiful is separated from the 
pleasant, which involves a distinct subjective purpose ; and 
from the good, because this involves the idea of an end, 
whether external to the object as in the case of utility, or 
immanent in the object as in the case of perfection. Perfec- 
tion, therefore, even when confusedly thought, is not as the 
Wolffian school supposed, the same as the beautiful, but is 
different in kind. We cannot ascribe perfection to an object, 
however confusedly, without applying to it, as the standard 
of judgment, some idea of an end. 

The "form of purposiveness" lies primarily, for Kant, 
in a harmonious relation to our faculties of imagination and 
understanding, so that we are not sure at first sight whether 
to take it to be purely accidental or to depend on that appear- 
ance of organic unity in an object which is suggested to us by 
such a phrase as "purposiveness without a purpose." It seems 
worth while to reproduce the note which shows how Kant 
himself understood his paradox. 

" It 1 might be adduced as an example that tells against this 
explanation (of beauty), that there are things in which we see 
a purposive form without recognising a purpose in them — for 
instance, the stone instruments found in ancient tumuli, with 
a hole in them as if for a handle, whose shape clearly shows 
a purposiveness the actual purpose of which we do not know 
— which nevertheless are not called beautiful. But the fact 
that we regard them as productions of art [sic, we must take 
it to mean industrial art] is enough to force us to admit that 
we refer their shape to some purpose and to a definite end. 
So there is absolutely no immediate pleasure in the perception 
of them. But a flower, for instance a tulip, is considered 
beautiful, because a certain purposiveness is found in the 
perception of it, which is not, within our act of judging, re- 



1 Krit. d. Urtheihkraft, p. 87 footnote. 



THE ESTHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS. 



265 



ferred to any end." It appears then, that the harmony of 
perception depends on a perception of harmony, although no 
explicit proposition can be made about the objective nature 
of the latter. 

The place and nature of the aesthetic consciousness is 
finally determined for philosophy by these four paradoxes. 
Only they set down the judgment of taste as "subjective," a 
limitation which it remained for Kant's successors explicitly 
to remove. 

Demarcation of The esthetic consciousness has now received 
iEstnetic con- its final negative definition. It is plainly marked 

sciousness. rr r , 0 . r , . J 

on irom the region 01 abstract intelligence on the 
one hand, and from that of sensuous gratification and moral 
satisfaction on the other. If the latter pair of contrasts, those 
between aesthetic interest and the two forms of practical in- 
terest, depend on a common-sense distinction (between exist- 
ence and appearance) which is not easily translated into exact 
psychical terms, it will be found that Kant himself furnishes 
the indication by which the antithesis can be made good. 
The peculiarity of aesthetic interest, which presented such 
difficulties to the greatest of the ancients, has never been 
mistaken by serious thinkers since thus trenchantly formu- 
lated by Kant. We may fairly assent to Hegel's verdict, 
when he finds in the introduction to the Critique of the 
Power of Judgment " the first rational word concerning 
beauty." 1 

Positive Essence Moreover, the aesthetic consciousness is 

of .Esthetic now recognised in its positive essence as the 

Consciousness • *■ 

meeting-point of sense and reason. All that we 
have thus far learnt about it has pointed to this conclusion, 
but Kant, with his usual calm audacity, was the first to lay 
down the principles which felicitously describe our everyday 
experience of the beautiful, while in the light of abstract 
metaphysic they appear to be the flattest self-contradictions. 
A feeling of pleasure which has no relation to practical inte- 
rest, which depends on the purposiveness of a perceived con- 
tent, and lays claim to universality and necessity, though 



1 Hist, of Philosophy, iii. 543. He has just quoted the sentence, " An 
object is beautiful, the form of which (not the material element, i.e., sensa- 
tion-stimulus, of its perception) is judged to be the ground of the pleasure 
taken in the image of such an object." 



266 



HISTORY OF AESTHETIC. 



remaining all the time a pure feeling, wholly free from explicit 
conceptions of purpose or class or antecedent and consequent, 1 
— such a feeling is a sheer impossibility alike to a sensationalist 
and to an intellectualist philosophy. It is not a clarified form 
of sense-gratification ; it is not a confused idea of perfection ; 
these are merely efforts to explain it upon wholly inadequate 
bases. It xsbond fide feeling, and bond fide reasonable. Such 
is the paradox which Kant propounds. It involves a hopeless 
" no thoroughfare," unless there is a unity, not accidental but 
inherent, between feeling, sense, or nature on the one hand, 
and reason, intelligence, or freedom on the other. 

its iii. But upon all these other contradictions he 

"Subjectivity." SU p er i m p 0ses a limitation which ostensibly with- 
draws the sense of beauty from the central position which at 
first sight he is supposed to claim for it. We are to bear in 
mind throughout that the judgment of taste is "subjective." 
The very phrase "judgment of taste" points to the partly 
British ancestry of Kant's doctrine, and to the sensationalist 
and empirical prejudices out of which he had to raise the 
whole question. The "judgment of taste" contributes in 
no way to cognition. It simply expresses a felt harmony 
in the play of our own powers on occasion of a certain per- 
ception. I have already touched on the issue how far the 
felt harmony in us implies a harmony in the object. At first 
sight however, and in his general language, Kant guards 
himself most anxiously against any such inference. We con- 
stantly meet with such expressions as " the universal sub- 
jective validity of the pleasure which we attach to the idea 
of an object which we call beautiful." How can a feeling 
that has universal validity remain subjective in the sense which 
excludes objective? Is not the whole idea a pure self-con- 
tradiction ? Yet there was no going back. Kant was right 
to be tenacious of his point. Beauty is subjective ; it exists 
in and for a percipient and not otherwise. But its subjectivity 
is no bar to its being objective as well. Kant says this in 
effect, but not in set terms. When it was said, the limitation 
of abstract subjectivity was removed, and the two worlds of 
dualistic tradition had their frontiers broken down. 

Thus far we see the Judgment of Taste recognised as a 



1 Necessity is the relation of antecedent and consequent in judgment, " If 
A, then B." 



THE JUDGMENT OF TASTE. 



267 



mental phenomenon carrying a number of contradictory at- 
tributes, only to be conciliated by assumptions which we may 
suggest, but cannot affirm, much less demonstrate. We 
have now to observe the development of this recognition, first 
in the hands of Kant himself and then in those of his suc- 
cessors, into the conception of a concrete unity, demonstrated 
by aesthetic science in the appreciative and productive sense 
of beauty, and by other philosophic methods in the history 
of nature and man. The immanence of the idea in reality is 
the root of objective idealism, and of this immanence the 
aesthetic perception furnishes the simplest and most striking 
example. 

conflict of Ab- 4. Kant's starting-point in aesthetic theory was, 
*£etefakaiavs as we have seen, the judgment of taste, which 
Esthetic, depends upon a de facto conformity between the 
percipient and that which is perceived. Here we have the 
common germ of an aesthetic of feeling and an aesthetic of 
pure form, two abstract extremes which are really inseparable. 
The unanalysed datum of disinterested pleasure in certain 
perceptions is an aspect of the unanalysed datum that certain 
perceptions give disinterested pleasure. These views, by 
their common opposition to discursive rationalism in aesthetic 
judgment, have the merit of vindicating the immediateness of 
aesthetic perception ; but by confusing this concrete immediate- 
ness with the absence of any significance that can be analysed 
by theory, they condemn the beautiful to absolute bareness 
of character and import. 

So long as Kant is absolutely true to his principle that 
without abstract conceptions there can be no objective judg- 
ment, and that beauty can involve no abstract conceptions, it 
follows that the pleasure of beauty, though possessing the 
formal attributes of reason — disinterestedness, universality, 
necessity — is yet ex hypothesi destitute of content, that is to 
say, destitute of any definite implication as to the positive im 
port of those forms, on the contemplation of which aesthetic 
pleasure arises. 

Now Kant never brings himself to admit that the judgment 
of taste can be objective, but he tampers to some extent with 
both of the principles which prevent him from admitting it. 
Without asserting that there can be objective judgment in the 
absence of definite abstract ideas, he admits a pregnant im- 
port into the form of beauty, through its relation to indefinite 



268 



HTSTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



ideas ; J without admitting that taste can involve intellectual 
conceptions, he both qualities it as an organ of communicable 
feeling, and distinguishes its higher forms by close association 
with objective and abstract ideas. It is only for the sake of 
his thesis that he sets down the judgment of taste, when thus 
associated, as "impure." 

Isolated tones and colours raise the difficulty at once. 
Have they aesthetic form ? If they have, in what can it be 
said to consist ? If they have not, their claim to beauty, as 
distinct from sensuous pleasantness, is annihilated. And in this 
latter case an exceedingly hazardous Sorites is received into 
the theory. If there are isolated sensations, such as enter into 
the beautiful, which have only pleasantness and no beauty, 
where does beauty begin to arise out of pleasantness ? 

Kant is prepared in some degree to assign pregnant form 
to simple tones and colours. This is the first lodgment 
effected by concrete import within his abstract judgment of 
taste. They are beautiful, he says, only because and in so far 
as they axe pure, which he explains as meaning free from per- 
turbation by mixture. Mixed colours and tones, he actually 
ventures to say, are not (in this sense) beautiful. This ex- 
planation, which reminds us of Plato, would not bear interpre- 
tation either by physical analysis or by direct perception. 
The eye and ear do not necessarily tell us which colours and 
sounds have the most uniform physical causes ; nor, if either 
sense or science detects a mixture of tones or spectrum 
colours, do we necessarily judge that mixture to be devoid of 
aesthetic purity, much less of aesthetic beauty. Would any 
unbiassed perception select a primary colour (red, green, or 
violet) or the tone of a tuning-fork (one of the few sounds 
that are fairly free from harmonics) as a type of purity ? 

It is perhaps some consciousness of this difficulty that 
drives Kant to a further suggestion, which in a modified 
shape has still a tendency to revive. Perhaps, he suggests, 
the rhythmical pulsations, which are the exciting cause 2 of 
tones and colours, may not merely have their effect on the 
organ of sense, but be actually perceived by the mind (which 
Kant " still greatly doubts "). In that case colour and tone 



1 See Antinomic d. Geschmacks, and its solution, K. d. U., 213 ff. 

2 Kant refers to Euler for the physical theory. 



PURITY. 



269 



have formal quality as unities of a manifold, and thus are 
beautiful in their own right. 

It can hardly be doubted that the unity, or unity in diver- 
sity, in which Kant thus endeavours to find the form of simple 
perceptions, has in his mind a reference to the conception of 
totality, which is an idea of the reason going beyond experi- 
ence, and therefore indefinite for knowledge, though regulative 
for practice. We shall see that aesthetic ideas are in his view 
pendants to ideas of Reason. 

But he is not quite sure whether this doctrine of significant 
form will work, and is partly inclined to abandon the beauty 
of colour as such, and to treat it as merely an ocular stimulus 
that enhances the visibility and value of line. Here we pass 
into a confusion between metaphysical "form " as the relation 
of parts in a significant whole, and " form " as the shape of 
visible bodies. It is plain that form in the metaphysical and 
aesthetic sense includes the harmonies of colour-composition, 
no less than those of linear or solid contour. 

If we grant, what is very doubtful, that single tones or 
colours can ever be considered in their isolation, their aesthetic 
quality as thus isolated depends upon a great variety of subtle 
suggestions, 1 among which the idea of purity is only one, being 
a species of unity in variety, and not arising from the mere 
fact of such unity. Ruskin's account of purity 2 shows how 
much definite significance this idea contains. The above is a 
typical case of Kant's vacillation between safe adherence to 
the abstract datum of aesthetic pleasure, and the sense that if 
he cannot find a content for it, his doctrine of form becomes 
inane. 

The case which in Plato ranks along with single tones and 
colours, that of very elementary geometrical figures, is rejected 
from the sphere of beauty by Kant. The abstract conception 
is too nearly implied in them, he thinks, to harmonise with the 
unreflective character of beauty. Here again he shows a 
needless dread of a specific content. The abstract conception 
behind them, so to speak, cannot prevent them from affording 
a slight degree of aesthetic pleasure to direct perception, in 
virtue of their presentation of certain qualities. 

1 See Baldwin Brown, The Fine Arts, Sect. 98. Kant himself develops 
the moral meaning which we find in colours and tones, " Courage, joyful- 
ness," etc. 

2 Mod, Painters, vol ii. p. 73 ff. 



270 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



Further, the doctrine 1 of free and dependent beauty, the 
latter including the ideal, exhibits in a striking light the diffi- 
culty which pressed upon Kant when he tried to associate a 
positive import w T ith the judgment of taste. 

"Free" beauty rests on no definite conception, and the 
judgment of taste that appreciates it is pure. " Dependent" 
beauty is conditioned by the definite conception of an end, 
and therefore so far violates the principle of purposiveness 
without a purpose, and the judgment of taste that appreciates 
it falls short of purity. 

Not only the lowest beauty, which subsequent philosophy 
would agree in calling subservient, but also the highest is 
ranked as dependent in virtue of this distinction. Architec- 
ture is plainly subordinate to use, and we are not surprised to 
find the beauty of buildings set down as dependent beauty. 
Rather it surprises us to be told that decorative art such as 
pattern-designing is " free " because it is not bound to repre- 
sent any object conditioned by a positive idea. We should 
naturally set down decoration as attached on the whole to 
architecture and governed by human use, and therefore, like 
architecture, dependent. But even architecture, Kant will 
insist, as having a very wide range of possible purposes, is 
although strictly dependent, yet free in comparison with ideal 
beauty. 

Natural beauty, except in those objects which are chiefly 
considered qua useful to man — such as the horse, or the [fruit] 
tree — is free. We must note the reason of this, which is 
simply that we cannot impose upon it any idea of a purpose. 
The beauty of a flower is free, for " no one but the botanist 
knows what a flower is meant to be (" Waseine Blume fur ein 
Ding sein soli "), and in judging of its beauty even he takes no 
account of this." I imagine that we should distinguish between 
knowledge of the purpose as enabling us to pronounce upon 
utility or perfection, which we should admit to be of no aesthe- 
tic value, and knowledge of the purpose as enabling us to 
appreciate organic unity, which we should take to be an enrich- 
ment of aesthetic insight. No one but a botanist, I should cer- 
tainly maintain, can really feel the beauty of flowers. If their 
beauty is " free " then, in comparison with that of a house or 
church, it is not because we are ignorant of their purpose, nor 



1 Kr. d. U., Sectt. 16 and 17. 



IDEAL AS " NORMAL IDEA." 27 I 



again, as in great works of art, because their purpose is ex- 
pression for expression's sake, but because what we must call 
their purpose is one with their own existence, and though 
usually conditioned by other lives 1 is not at any point cut in 
two by its relation to them. For us, therefore, the flower is 
harmoniously expressive throughout, in virtue of being a rea- 
sonable unity. All objects, even works of art, are conditioned 
by external agencies ; it is not the fact of a relation to con- 
dition or purpose, but the marked conflict of purposes within 
the system which man's will has power to introduce, that 
stamps the mark of subserviency on the decorated instruments 
of human life. 

Most dependent and least free of all, according to Kant, is 
the beauty which is capable of an ideal. There can be no 
ideal either of the lower dependent beauty, or of the interme- 
diate free beauty. An ideal can only be fixed by objective 
pttrposiveness, and objective purposiveness is ex hypotkesi out- 
side beauty, and can never be judged of by a pure judgment 
of taste, but only by one which is partly intellectualised. 
Ideal means the presentation or imagination of a particular 
being as adequate to an idea of the reason. 

The ideal then has two elements. First, there is the un- 
known type, or intention of nature, in every race of men or 
animals. Such a type is represented through the automatic 
work of the imagination, which strikes an average of shapes 
out of the thousands of individuals that have been seen. This 
process is illustrated by a comparison to optical images thrown 
upon one another, which suggests Mr. Galton's method of 
generalised photographs. Every breed of animals will pre- 
sent, and every race of men will present and possess, a " nor- 
mal idea" thus constituted ; and this will form the foundation 
or conditio sine qua non of beautiful presentation in and for 
that race. Both this idea of an average as the key to the 
intention of nature, and the allusion to the taste of negroes 
and Chinese as probably conditioned by the type familiar to 
them, remind us of Reynolds in the Idler, and point forward 
to Hegel, who depreciates mere "taste" on this very ground. 

And in Kant's treatment what we have to note is his atti- 
tude to the "normal idea." His language suggests that he 
thought at first, as Reynolds did, that this "idea" was the 



1 Those of insects. 



272 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



ideal of beauty ; for it appears that he called it so in the earlier 
editions of this Critique, and the phrase " Normal idea of 
beauty " still occurs in the discussion. But he subsequently 
saw how little import this average type possessed, and the 
Critique now expressly says that it can contain nothing char- 
acteristic 1 of a person, is not beautiful but merely correct, 2 and 
that the average regularity of feature, which it brings out in 
man, usually indicates mediocrity of mind. The normal pro- 
portions which it exhibits are however the limit or condition 
sine qua non upon which true beauty is founded. 

The ideal of Beauty in the strict sense is something beyond 
this, and has meaning only in the human race. It consists in 
the revelation of moral import through bodily manifestation in 
the human form. Without this the object cannot give univer- 
sal and positive pleasure as distinct from the mere customary 
and negative pleasantness of the " correct." It is the highest 
problem of the artist, and requires pure ideas of reason, and 
great powers of imagination. But as the standard thus set 
involves a definite conception of man as an end, it follows 
that " judgment by such a standard can never be purely 
aesthetic, and judgment according to an ideal of beauty is no 
mere judgment of taste." Beauty judged according to an 
ideal is therefore not free but dependent beauty. And thus it 
only just misses being admitted as objective ; for, though not 
objective qua beauty, it is objective in virtue of that concep- 
tion which makes it dependent. 

Now if beauty is regarded as subservient to morality, or is 
judged by the standard of specifically moral ideas, it is beyond 
a doubt unfree or dependent. But if the content of life and 
reason is taken into beauty and perceived not as the expres- 
sion of morality, but as the utterance in another form of that 
reasonableness which is also to be found in morality, then we 
first destroy the restriction of ideal beauty to man — for there 
is reasonableness in all nature — and we secondly break down 
the extraordinary paradox that the highest beauty is the least 
free. That beauty which is the largest and deepest revelation 
of spiritual power is not the most dependent but the freest 
beauty, because it implies no purpose whatever excepting that 

1 The " characteristic," the central idea of modern aesthetic, had been em- 
phasised in Goethe's Deutsche Baukunst, 1780 ; but its appearance in Kant is 
noteworthy. 

2 Schulgerecht. 



THE SYMBOL. 



which constitutes its own inmost nature, the expression of 
reason in sensuous form. It is plain that Kant felt this and 
practically recognised the true rank of such beauty, but was 
baffled in attempting to include it in his formal datum, the 
judgment of taste. 

Yet with his strange persistence, approaching his subject, 
like a beleaguered city by sapping up to it on different sides,„ 
he has still a great deal in reserve that affects this unacknow- 
ledged objectivity of the judgment of taste. He is clear, for 
example, that taste involves a " common sense," not the under- 
standing which employs abstract ideas, but some kind of 
common feeling. And this, he thinks, may perhaps in the 
last resort represent a demand of the reason that sense is to 
be made harmonious or congruous in its utterances. 1 At least 
the communicability which is distinctive of aesthetic feeling 
gives it a high social interest from the most primitive times, 
although this is not an interest in beauty as such. In this 
discussion we find at once an anticipation and a criticism of an 
important modern view, that which lays stress on the social 
and festal origin of art. 2 

Moreover, when he comes to consider what must be added 
to taste in order to make up productive capacity in fine art, 
he decides that this is "genius," a conception in which he 
analyses, without any historical reference whatever, the watch- 
word of the "period of genius" then hardly gone by. The 
essence of genius he finds in the power to portray aesthetic 
ideas ; and aesthetic ideas are imaginative presentations such 
that no conception is able to exhaust their significance. In 
this they are the counterpart of ideas of the reason, 3 to which 
no presentation can be adequate. 

If we ask how the aesthetic idea is the counterpart of the 
idea or postulate of reason, we find that the relation is ex- 
plained by a definite doctrine of symbolism. 4 A symbol is for 
him a perception or presentation which represents a concep- 
tion neither conventionally as a mere sign, nor directly but 
in the abstract as a " scheme," but indirectly though appro- 
priately through a similarity between the rules which govern 
our reflection in the "symbol" and in the thing (or idea) 
symbolised. Thus when we think of a monarchical state as an 



x Kr. d. U., p. 9:2. 2 p rof> Brown, The Fine Arts, Bk. i. 
3 Pp. 185-6. 4 P. 231. 

T 



HISTORY OF AESTHETIC. 



organism if the system is constitutional, and as a machine if it 
is despotic, organism and machine are symbols, the resem- 
blance to the monarchical state depending in each case on the 
principle of. cohesion which we impute to the things com- 
pared. 

In this sense qf symbolism Beauty is a symbol of the moral 
order, 1 and this order is the intelligible or supra-sensuous 
reality to which the judgment of taste ultimately points. It is 
this relation which expresses itself in the semi-rational nature 
ascribed to beauty in the four paradoxes. On this ground, 
again, interest in the beauty of nature is the sign of a good 
mind, because the reason is concerned that its ideas or 
demands shall not only have validity but find objective 
reality within the world of sense. And the traces of con- 
formity in nature to a disinterested judgment in us, which 
constitute natural beauty and testify to an underlying unity 
between nature and the moral order, are therefore of interest 
to human thought. We should now extend this idea to the 
beauty of Art ; but it is remarkable that Kant, probably under 
Rousseau's influence, explicitly refuses to do so, thinking of 
art not as a revelation of existing beauty, but as made to con- 
form to our ends and too often to flatter our egoism. 

In all this account of beauty, which accords to it the highest 
significance, the term objective is still lacking ; but it is 
obvious that nothing of objectivity is lacking except the 
name. And with the objectivity thus practically conceded, 
there come in significance, and the characteristic, and natural 
as opposed to conventional symbolism. All these were the 
watchwords of the time just beginning, as taste and beauty 
had been the watchwords of that which had gone by. In 
general, including both nature and art, beauty is for Kant the 
expression of aesthetic ideas, 2 which means, as we have seen, 
the suggestion in sensuous form, of demands or aspirations or 
principles of reason which no such perception can completely 
and adequately contain. 

5. We ' have seen that in his general theory 

Range and Sub- T7 . r -1 , ■ , 

division of Kant is forced to admit a concrete import into 
^ S ception. er ~ wnat was at first an unanalysable deliverance of 
feeling. How far, we must now enquire, does he 

1 " Sittlichkeit," p. 232. Even in Kant this word has not quite the isolated 
personal reference of our English term " morality." 2 P. 192. 



THE SUBLIME. 



275 



himself contribute to determining the actual field of aesthetic 
perception, and the relation between its content and the sen- 
suous media in which it can be clothed ? The answer to this 
enquiry is in the doctrine of the sublime and the classification 
of the arts. 

i. Kant's account of the sublime is interposed 
of "sublime, between two parts of his account of the beautiful, 
and appears to have had the effect of forcing upon 
his mind the deeper symbolic character in beauty which at 
first he was disposed to find only in sublimity. Historically 
speaking, his theory was probably occasioned by that of 
Burke, and on its spiritual side might very well have been 
suggested by a single remark of Winckelmann, whose name, 
however, so far as I am aware, does not occur in Kant. Its 
subsequent effect may be traced in Hegel's conception both 
of symbolic and of romantic art, and more generally, it was 
the true forerunner of all aesthetic theory which brings appar- 
ent ugliness within the frontier of beauty. For Kant's allusion 
in another context to the ugly as capable of being beautifully 
portrayed in art is a weak survival of Lessing's ideas, and has 
little to do with the growing modern sympathy for what is un- 
disguisedly sombre, wild, or terrible. 

The firm and plain basis of Burke's distinction between 
the beautiful and the sublime was, it will be remembered, 
the difference between the pleasantness of pleasure and the 
pleasantness of pain. It is undoubtedly upon this foundation 
that Kant erects his theory, in which fear, corresponding to 
Burke's " passions relating to self-preservation, which turn 
mostly on pain or danger," suggests a principal case of sub- 
limity, Winckelmann's remark that in looking upon the sea 
the mind is at first depressed and then recovers itself more 
strongly, might very well have suggested Kant's idea of the 
spiritual reinvigoration occasioned by perceptions which in 
some way do violence 1 to our sensuous fancy. 

For Kant, as for Burke, there is no acknowledged synthesis 
of the sublime with the beautiful, although the final conception 
of beauty as attained by Kant in the latter part of his discus- 
sion would admit of such a synthesis. We cannot say, there- 
fore, that he makes the sublime a species of the beautiful. 
Both, rather, are species of the aesthetic judgment, but only 



1 " Gewaltthatig fur d. Einbildungskraft," Kr. d. 17., p. 99. 



276 



HISTORY OF AESTHETIC. 



beauty belongs to the judgment of taste, while the sublime is 
rooted in an emotion of the intelligence (Geistesgefuhl). The 
two modes of feeling share indeed the semi-rational character, 
subjective yet universal, which marks the aesthetic judgment 
as such, but they differ widely in the nature of their object- 
matter and in their consequent relation to it. 

Beauty always has to do with form ; sublimity may depend 
on form or on " Unform," a useful idiom which may cover 
both formlessness and deformity. 1 The object of sublime 
feeling (we may not in strictness speak of a sublime object) 
is always one that resists our power of judgment, and so far 
from being harmonious, is rather incongruous with it. For 
this reason the sublime is one degree more subjective than 
the beautiful, and in every way is more difficult, making 
higher demands upon the mind. Its essence is to throw us 
back on ourselves, to depend upon our acquired culture and 
ideas, of which it demands much more than the sense of 
beauty, to give an austere or negative pleasure akin to awe 
and admiration, to communicate a serious and stirring, not 
a playful and tranquil movement to the imagination, and as 
incapable of residing in any sensuous form to stimulate only 
the ideas of the reason and not those of the understanding. 
For the former, which can be represented in no sense-per- 
ception, are evoked in us by the very conflict or incongruous- 
ness which exhibits to us the inadequacy of sense. This 
special relation to reason was probably intended to be a 
radical difference between the sublime and the beautiful, but 
is obliterated as a distinction by the concluding account in 
the Dialectic which places the latter also in essential relation 
to ideas of reason or of the moral order. 

In spite of this inward and ideal character, however, Kant 
tries to restrict the sublime, like the beautiful, to mere abstract 
feeling. We must not appeal in our perception of it to dis- 
tinct conceptions drawn from our knowledge. We must 
accept the feeling as it follows from what we directly see. 
We must not think of the stars as suns with their systems, 
nor of the sea as the reservoir of the clouds or the highway 
of the nations. We must judge them aesthetically only as 
a crowd of luminous points in an immeasurable vault, and as 



1 Kant never, I think, uses "hasslich" of the object of sublime feeling. 
He does use " grasslich." 



THE SUBLIME. 



277 



a shining surface or menacing abyss. To our minds to-day 
this dualism seems unreasonable. We cannot understand 
why feeling should be void of content, especially as the sub- 
lime exists in the reaction of our ideas, and is explicitly 
characterised, in language that anticipates Ruskin, as depen- 
dent on relations. But the result is that this peculiar stimu- 
lation is chiefly to be looked for in unwrought 1 and inorganic 
Nature, a striking testimony to the widening of the aesthetic 
sense. It is also said to be suggested, strictly in accordance 
with the theory, by the extreme of formlessness in the Jewish 
prohibition, " Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven 
image." Longinus, it will be remembered, had drawn an 
example from the books of Moses. In the instance adduced 
by Kant, an idea taken from a consciousness hostile to ex- 
pression through sense, becomes, by a very curious meeting 
of extremes, the content of poetry at the point where it tends 
to pass out of the sphere of art. Thus the extremes of con- 
sciousness below and above the region of beautiful expression, 
appear in this case to join hands. 

The idea which underlies Kant's theory is thus quite clear. 
It is closely analogous to his view of the moral law, which is 
in his mind throughout. The sublime in its two species — 
mathematical, i.e. excited by objects which reveal the impo- 
tence of sense to satisfy the idea of totality, and dynamical, 
i.e. evoked by objects or occurrences which reveal our power- 
lessness as natural beings to overcome the forces of Xature, 
though our moral freedom is superior to their omnipotence, — 
depends on the stimulation of our moral ideas, which nothing 
in sensuous nature can either represent or overcome, by a 
primary non-conformity between an external object and our 
power of judgment. 

I do not know whether any stray echoes of Kantian specu- 
lation penetrated to the poet Thomas Campbell (d. 1S44); 
but the mental reaction in which Kant finds the sublime is 
fairly represented by the closing stanzas of his lyric, " The 
Last Man." 2 Kant would, however, remind us that God and 
Immortality are postulates, not facts. 



1 "Roh. N 

2 " Go, Sun, while Mercy holds me up 

On Nature's awful waste, 
To drink this last and bitter cup 
Of grief that man shall taste ; — 



278 



HISTORY OF .ESTHETIC. 



It is a conception which bears noble testimony to the 
inspiration which sea 1 and mountain 1 were beginning to 
impart. But in its true place, as a theory of apparent ugli- 
ness in relation to beauty, it has a fatal defect of principle. 
This defect was signalised above as the absence of any syn- 
thesis of the sublime with the beautiful, and is rooted in the 
subjectivity ascribed by Kant to beauty, and the double sub- 
jectivity imputed to the sublime. In beauty the "form" has 
a content which can be analysed, although its purposive 
import must not be definitely affirmed, but the essence of the 
sublime falls wholly within the mind, so that absolutely no 
conformity is assumed between stimulus and reaction, and 
therefore no attempt can possibly be made to attach expres- 
sive significance to the objects which by purely negative 
behaviour serve as such stimuli. And so the link of expres- 
sive or characteristic structure, which stands ready to guide 
us step by step from facile and orderly beauty to the more 
sombre and intricate aspects of life and nature, is absolutely 
cut asunder ; and we are never taught to look for the form 
of the beautiful in those very perceptions which startle us at 
first sight by superhuman force or magnitude. And therefore 
the ideas of reason thus negatively evoked can have only a 
bare moral victory, and are not recognised as prevailing, in 
an intricate orderliness and significance, throughout all the 
terror and immensity of the external world. With Turner 
and Ruskin before us, we do not comprehend the aesthetic 
perception to which, as to Kant, the stormy sea was simply 
horrible, and the elements of splendid beauty in the lines 
and masses which express its resistlessness made no positive 
appeal to the imagination. The sublime with all it implies 
could not be rightly valued until it came to be appreciated as 
an extension of beauty, indeed, but still an extension of beauty. 



Go tell the Night that hides thy face, 
Thou saw'st the last of Adam's race 

On earth's sepulchral clod, 
The darkening Universe defy 
To quench his immortality, 
Or shake his trust in God." 
1 The references to De Saussure, combined with the restriction of the 
sublime proper to wild inorganic nature, prove, I think, that the Alps were 
largely in Kant's mind. His phrase, " rohe Natur," is erroneously referred 
to beauty and organic beings by von Hartmann, sEstlictik, i., 15. Kant 
often mentions the sea. 



GENIUS. 



279 



But for a view which shut up both attributes within a sub- 
jective mental reaction, no positive meeting-point in the 
significant form of perceptions was open to them. Without 
a concrete analysis no synthesis was possible. 

So much for the range of beauty, which, if we follow for 
the moment our general sense of the term as equivalent to 
''aesthetic quality," Kant has immensely amplified in accord- 
ance with modern feeling, by his theory of the sublime, 
classification of u. In dealing with the sensuous vehicles of 
Arts - beauty, 1 as they constitute the different arts, Kant 
is very brief and unsystematic, though in many places he 
anticipates later contentions. The theory of a developing art- 
consciousness, and an appreciation of the antithesis between the 
ancient and modern world are conspicuous by their absence, 2 
a lacuna plainly connected with his dread of objective teleo- 
logy. For the same reason, there are but few traces of a de- 
sire to regard the material media of the arts as forming an 
orderly system in which all necessary kinds of expression 
might find a place. In distinguishing fine art from science 
however, with the claims of the " period of genius" before his 
mind, he makes a striking suggestion, which Hegel adopts, 
and which in Kant leads up to important results. It is true, 
he says, that genius though not independent of training or 
reflection, is a gift rooted in nature, of which it shows the un- 
conscious creative power, and is the peculiar organ of fine art, 
which may even be defined as the art of genius. This natural 
gift is not in the same sense needed for exact science, which 
is pursued purely through conscious intellectual operations. 
Anyone, (having enough intellect, we must suppose) could 
learn all that Newton taught ; but he could not, by taking 
thought, even begin to learn how to make a poem. Here we 
have at once an immense advance on Lessing and eighteenthr 
century ideas, 3 though Kant is above the wildness of the 
youthful Goethe and Schiller. 

1 Kant drops out the sublime almost entirely from his theory of art. The 
product of art comes too near implying an objective conception to be con- 
nected with a feeling which, even more than beauty, demands absolute purity. 
For a combination of beauty and sublimity Kant once refers us to "rhymed 
tragedy," a strange proof how little he approached a synthesis. 

2 The conclusion of Observations on the feeling of the Sublime and Beautiful 
shows how Kant stood on the old lines about the Renaissance and Gothic art. . 

3 Dr. Johnson took the opposite line. " Newton could have written a great; 
epic if he had chosen." 



-280 



HISTORY OF AESTHETIC. 



Fine art, then, is closely akin to nature. The paradoxes of 
beauty explain how this must be. All beauty, and therefore 
nature qua beautiful, has the form of purposiveness. All 
beauty, and therefore the beauty of art, is free from definable 
purpose. Art, therefore, is beautiful, when, although known 
to be art, it apears as free — unconscious of rule or set purpose 
— as nature. Nature is beautiful when it appears to possess 
the purposiveness of art. These ideas, thrown out in a few 
sentences, have their consequences in the views of Schiller and 
Hartmann. 

Kant's actual classification of the fine arts, 1 on which the 
author himself lays no great stress, rests on a fantastic deduc- 
tion from the true principle, that beauty whether of art or of 
nature is expression. Expression par excellence is speech, and 
this as communicating at once thought, perception and feeling, 
has the three elements, word, gesture, and modulation or 
accent. On this analogy he divides the fine or expressive 
arts into arts of speech, of form, and of play of sensation. 
Judging from an earlier passage, in which he has said that 
the form of all objects of sense is either " shape "or " play," 
the distinction between simultaneity and succession would 
seem to be also in his mind. 

We find in his table two crafts which ought not to be in- 
cluded among fine arts, the art of oratory and the art of 
landscape gardening. The former is plainly dominated by 
practical intent ; the latter does not deal with a true expressive 
material. The former he ranks with the arts of speech, the 
latter with those of form. 

I mentioned the origin of this unfortunate classification, 
because the distinction between speaking and formative art 
has been erected into a principle, and oratory being necessarily 
omitted, has led to the species of poetry being set out in an 
imaginary parallelism to the non-poetical arts, as by Schel- 
ling, the former being called the Ideal and the latter the Real 
series, and this notion of two parallel series, under these or 
other headings, has continued to operate in later German philo- 
sophy with the most unnatural results, grave difficulty being 
; found, in particular, as to the place which music ought to 
hold. 

Kant's nearest approach to a linear classification is given in 



P. 73- 



rant's scheme of the arts. 



281 



his comparison of the aesthetic value of the fine arts. In this, 
poetry is assigned the first place, and some words of this 
estimate set the keynote for Schiller's doctrine of "semblance" 
and " play." " Poetry plays with the semblance, 1 without 
deceiving ; for it declares its occupation to be mere play." 
Painting, it should be noted, has already been called the art 
of sensuous semblance, and plastic, including architecture and 
sculpture, that of sensuous truth. Of course for the complete 
doctrine of aesthetic semblance, which Kant only offends 
against in expression and not for a moment in thought, the 
form of sculpture is a " Schein " as much as that of painting, 
only less adaptable and so less ideal. Painting therefore 
ranks above it. This gradation prepares us for the series of 
the arts according to ideality in Hegel. About the rank of 
music there is a curious variety of suggestions. For us they 
have the interest that a later theory of the original import of 
music as depending on its relation to the emotional modula- 
tions of the voice, is here suggested and accepted as a fact, but 
put aside as not bearing on aesthetic value, but on associations 
which are only of interest to private feeling. The aesthetic 
value of music is referred to the mathematical interrelation by 
which the complex of sounds is made into a whole attended 
with an abundance of thoughts too full for verbal expression. 
But these thoughts depend on purely mechanical associations ; 
and the essential content of music is therefore so bare, and 
the culture it implies so slight, that apart from its mere 
pleasantness, in which it ranks first of all arts, and its charm 
and emotional power (due to voice associations), in which it 
ranks second, it ought to be placed lowest of the whole list. 
This remark, like almost the entire content of Kant's aesthetic, 
reappears in a much modified form in Hegel. And the ana- 
lysis of musical beauty as depending on the mathematical 
relations which bind its parts into a coherent whole recurs in 
conjunction with a less humble estimate of its aesthetic value, 
in the deepest modern appreciation of musical significance, that 
which regards it as representing the spirit or idealised form of 
occurrence or existence. 2 In noting Kant's perplexities about 
music, we may remember that he made little use of the ancients 
who knew something of its true value, which we have seen to 
be greatly neglected through the middle age and in eighteenth 



1 "Schein," K. d. U., 201. 2 "Hanslick," in Lotze, G. d. A., 486 ff. 



282 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



century criticism. And we should be grateful to Kant for 
at least striving to recognise the greatest art of his time. 

Kant gives no account of the comic within the limits of fine 
art. He inclines to regard >the jest 1 as belonging rather to 
the arts of pleasure. Nevertheless his famous definition of 
laughter as an affection arising from an expectation suddenly 
brought to nothing, 2 probably had to do with Hegel's defini- 
tion of comedy. His direct connection of the mental shock 
thus experienced with the muscular convulsion of laughter has 
a materialistic sound, recalling Burke ; but modern psychology 
has much to say of the bond between mental and muscular 
tension, and the simplicity and abruptness of Kant's identifi- 
cation should count in his favour, if, as seems probable, it 
contains an important truth. When we hold our breath in 
expectation, and then undergo a violent change of tension 
through the expectation coming to nothing, we certainly go 
through a process like that which Kant describes. And 
although expectation and tension have many causes, it might 
be maintained that there is a peculiar suddenness and com- 
pleteness of contrast in the relaxation that accompanies 
amusement, which is well described by Kant's phrase 
" brought to nothing." In the case of serious disappoint- 
ment for instance, the expectation changes to something 
positive though opposite. 

Kant, we must insist, was a good observer. His shrewd 
and decisive criticisms of society, literature, and national 
character have an Aristotelian quality. A translation of well- 
chosen extracts from the Critique of the Power of J udgment, 
and still more from the earlier work — in itself a mere note- 
book — Observations on the Feeling of the Sublime and Beau- 
tiful, would throw quite a new light on the popular idea 
of the great metaphysician. The habit of taking up into his 
theory great numbers of everyday terms which he explains 
in passing by terse and pregnant definitions, is characteristic 
of Kant and Lessing, as of Aristotle. It was adopted by 
Schiller and Hegel, and has much to do with the grasp and 
solidity of objective idealism. 

conclusion. 6. If we now recall, for the last time, in order 
to measure the difference between the starting - points of 
ancient and modern aesthetic, the three principles and anti- 



1 P. 207. 



2 lb. 



THE THREE ANTITHESES. 



283 



theses by which we judged the theories of the Greeks, we 
shall find ourselves in a different world, 

i. The metaphysical criticism of fine art which treated it as 
an inferior species of common reality and therefore as sub- 
ordinate to that reality in import and beneath it in utility, 
has yielded to a view which ranks it as the superior co-ordi- 
nate of natural products, both having beauty only as freely 
symbolic or expressive of supra-sensuous meaning. Imita- 
tion is replaced by symbolism, and even if art is held to be in 
one sense bound by external reality, it is understood that in 
as far as it deals with mere form or with imaginative ideas it 
has the advantage of nature and not vice versa. The meta- 
physical criticism is replaced by theories of the metaphysical 
import of beauty. 

ii. The moralistic criticism with its confusion between 
aesthetic and practical interest, is almost wholly swept away. 
With the frank acceptance of what Plato treated as its in- 
feriority, the restriction to imaginative form or semblance, now 
opposed alike to sensuous solicitation and to definitely con- 
ceived purpose, the beautiful is finally freed from the suspi- 
cion of sensuality and from the claims of moral proselytism. 
Only in Kant a trace of moralism remains in as far as the 
permanent value of the beautiful is referred by him exclu- 
sively to its representation of moral ideas and the moral order, 
in consequence of the subjectivism which hinders him from 
plainly asserting the existence of any more general system 
which might express itself not only through morality in the 
world of conduct, but otherwise in other spheres. In pointing 
however to a supra-sensuous unity common to the world of 
nature and of freedom, he really transcends this false subor- 
dination ; and we might say that beauty is for him a symbol of 
morality only because and in as far as he understands morality 
to -symbolise the order of the universe. 

iii. The formal principle of unity and variety, which stood 
in the way of a concrete analysis of beauty, is being trans- 
formed into the principle of expressiveness, characterisation, 
significance. In Kant's discussion of colours and tones we 
saw the meeting-point of the two. A positive or concrete 
structure of aesthetic science is as yet, indeed, only in the 
making. The outlines are firmly traced and the materials 
are lying about in heaps, but the building is hardly begun. 
The idea of beauty is still, if I may use the expression, a con- 



284 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



crete conceived in the abstract, a meeting point of polar ex- 
tremes not yet exhibited in the kinds and phases determined 
by their varying relations. 

Thus we may henceforward confine ourselves to the aesthe- 
tic problem proper, and its import, if any, for general philo- 
sophy. A distinct and reflective aesthetic consciousness has 
been created both for philosophy and for art. It is only since 
Goethe, it has been truly said, that the artist has been con- 
scious of his " mission." Whether, as Kant seems to assume, 1 
this consciousness is a fortunate condition for creative genius, 
must be very seriously doubted. But for philosophy reflect- 
ing upon beauty it is indispensable. 

The aesthetic problem 2 as inherited by Kant consisted in 
the question " How can a pleasurable feeling partake of the 
character of reason?" To this we have seen his answer in 
the four paradoxes and their corollaries. Its expansion we 
shall have to trace in later thought. The problem of general 
philosophy which gave urgency to the aesthetic issue con- 
sisted in the question, " How can the sensuous and the ideal 
world be reconciled ? " The answer to this we have seen in 
the relation between the three portions of Kant's critical 
problem. The order of nature and the moral order must, he 
contends, have a common root, which is manifested most 
strikingly in the spontaneous harmony of natural necessity 
and ideal purpose exhibited to the perceptive and creative 
sense of beauty. The unconsciousness and freedom which 
fine art shares with nature indicates that this purposiveness 
is really immanent in material things, and is not forced from 
without upon the sensuous or natural elements. If so, they 
too are inherently rational, and the compatibility, nay more, 
the ultimate unity of the natural and moral order is estab- 
lished. 

Kant, as we know, wrote the reservation "subjective" over 
the entire outcome of his aesthetic and teleological researches. 
Even when he anticipated later theory by a suggestion for a 
Universal History which should establish a purpose of nature 
in the life of the human race, evolving moral civilisation through 
the conflicts of pain and desire, and when he combated, on 
this ground, the difficulty that earlier generations are sacrificed 



1 Observations, etc., " Conclusion." 

2 See ch. viii. end. 



THE FUTURE OF KANT S IDEAS. 



to an end they will never know, 1 all this is to him simply a 
point of view, a way in which the aggregate of facts may be 
reduced to a system. 

It is clear that either the idea or the reservation is unten- 
able. What experience compels us to assume, is objective for 
us. What is not essential to explain our experience, we have 
no right to dwell upon in serious thought. It was rather the 
nature of objectivity than the reality of the immanent idea 
that was called in question by Kant's reservation. 

A new spirit would be brought to the consideration of this 
issue, when the concrete idea, as Kant had obtained it by the 
resolution of the inherited antithesis of nature and freedom, 
should be accepted as the nature of the real, and further en- 
riched by the same- antithesis in its historical form as be- 
tween the ancient and the modern mind. For the immanent 
reason would then reveal itself to be not merely a statical but 
a dynamical unity, not merely an equilibrium but an evolution. 



1 " Build a house they will never live in." This essay, Werke, vol. 7. was 
written in 1784, but its views are practically reaffirmed in the Critique of 
Judgment. 



CHAPTER XI. 



THE FIRST STEPS OF A CONCRETE SYNTHESIS SCHILLER AND 

GOETHE. 

The Position of I- " The above may be taken as the leading re- 
schmer. suits of the Kantian critical philosophy, so far as 
they interest us in aesthetic. It forms the point of departure 
for the true comprehension of the beauty of art. Yet such a 
comprehension could only be realised by an overcoming of 
the Kantian defects through a higher appreciation of the true 
unity of necessity and freedom, of particular and universal, of 
sensuous and rational. 

''And so it must be admitted that the art-sense of a pro- 
found mind — which was philosophic as well as artistic — 
demanded and proclaimed the principle of totality and recon- 
ciliation before the time at wdiich it was recognised by tech- 
nical philosophy. In so doing it opposed itself to (Kant's) 
abstract infinity of thought, his duty for duty's sake, and his 
formless ' understanding ' which takes account of nature and 
reality, sense and feeling, only as a limit, as something ab- 
solutely hostile, and therefore antagonistic to itself. It is 
Schiller then to whom we must give credit for the great ser- 
vice of having broken through the Kantian subjectivity and 
abstraction of thought, and ventured upon going quite beyond 
it by intellectually apprehending the unity and reconciliation as 
the truth, and by making them real through the power of art. 

Now this unity of the universal and particular, of 
freedom and necessity, of the spiritual and the natural, which 
Schiller scientifically apprehended as principle and essence of 
art, and unweariedly strove to call to life by art and aesthetic 
culture, was in the next place erected into the principle of 
knowledge and existence as itself the Idea, the Idea being 
recognised as the sole truth and reality. It was by this recog- 
nition that science attained in Schelling its absolute stand- 
point," 1 



1 Hegel, ^Esth., i. 78, 80. (E. Tr. p. 116.) 



OBJECTIVITY IN SCHILLER. 



287 



It is thus that Hegel in his maturer years recalls the history 
of the time, when, as we shall see in the following chapter, 
his youthful friendship with Schelling was still unbroken, and 
when the two friends, in close correspondence, were forming 
their views under the twofold influence of Kant and Fichte on 
the one hand, and of Schiller and Goethe on the other. 

It is strange that historians of aesthetic take no notice of 
this remarkable testimony. Hegel was not the man lightly 
to give credit to an amateur thinker at the expense of philo- 
sophy proper. I shall therefore attempt simply to illustrate 
his statement in dealing with Schiller's conceptions, which 
definitely initiated the fusion of Kant's abstract synthesis with 
the historical data of aesthetic. 

Schiller was on one side of his mind a Kantian, while on 
the other he was both a classicist by study and sympathy, and 
a romanticist by his period and his genius. Thus he formed 
a link between Kant and Goethe. For Goethe shared these 
factors of Schiller's mind in inverse proportion. Though as a 
rule barely tolerant of metaphysic, he w r as not untouched by 
Kant, while the marriage of Faust and Helena is a symbol of 
his lifelong devotion to the reconciliation of Hellenism w T ith 
what is best in the romantic spirit. Hegel, with obvious 
justice, connects the deeper interpretation of the beautiful, 
which now began, with the growth of romantic feeling in art. 1 
Thus the relations between Schiller and Goethe were pre- 
eminently favourable to the investiture of Kantian abstractions 
with living reality. 

The achievement which Hegel ascribed to Schiller is in its 
essence, 1, the abandonment of the reservation by which at 
every turn Kant ascribes subjectivity, in a sense excluding 
objectivity, to the unity of opposites which he found in the 
aesthetic judgment. Schiller's account of aesthetic semblance 
and the play impulse may be treated under this head, as the 
positive form under which he envisages the objective nature 
of beauty. 

And to this we must add, 2, as a corollary the first recog- 
nition, based on definite conceptions, of a difference between 
modern principles of art — whether to be called principles 
of beauty or by some other name — and those which had 
currently been assigned to the art of antiquity. The link be- 



<&sth., i. 27-8. (E. Tr. p. 39.) 



288 



HISTORY OF /ESTHETIC. 



tween the objectivity of the beautiful and the latitude of the 
perception or principle which constitutes it, depends upon the 
dynamical nature of an objective principle, demanding as it 
does a relevancy to the movements and phases of the human 
mind, instead of acquiescence in the first indolent impressions 
of feeling. Indications of the actual range of Schiller's 
aesthetic sympathies may fairly be treated in this connection, 
objectivity of i. At the close of chap. ix. I alluded to the event- 
Beauty. f u i decade which followed the publication of the 
Kritik d. Urtheilskraft. The first of its characteristics 
which comes before us is that it contains nearly the whole 
of Schiller's work in theoretical aesthetic. From 1792 till 
after 1800 there appeared almost yearly, for the most part 
in publications such as Thalia and the Horen,\ papers or 
short treatises by Schiller dealing with aesthetic problems. 
From 1795 onwards, it must be remembered, Goethe and 
Schiller were in active correspondence, so that in the writings 
of either the ideas of the other were to some extent repre- 
sented. Their " period of genius" lay behind them. In 
1795 Schiller was in his thirty-sixth and Goethe in his forty- 
sixth year. Werther and Gotz v. Berlichingen were things 
of twenty years ago. The Rduber was written at least four- 
teen years before. The romantic movement which their 
stormy youth had inaugurated was now developing in other 
hands. 

The Schlegels, for example, began their activity in this 
decade, an activity which furnished to profounder thinkers 
and critics of greater real genius than themselves, a splendid 
wealth of material and a constant reminder of the historical 
antithesis between the classical and the romantic. It should 
be added that Voss's Homer (the Iliad new, the Odyssey 
revised) appeared in 1790, and F. A. Wolf's Prolegomena in 
1795. This was the epoch in which Schiller, the descendant 
of Lessing 2 and Winckelmann no less than of Kant, was 
brought face to face with the question whether or no the art- 
impulse and the sense of beauty rested on a true immanent 



1 In which Goethe and Schiller co-operated in 1795-6. Schiller's Letters 

on The Esthetic Education of Humanity and his paper on "Naive and Senti- 
mental Poetry " appeared in it. 

2 Compare the titles of Lessing's Erziehung d. Menschengeschlechts % and 
Schiller's Briefe iiber d. sEsthetische Erz. d. Menschheit. 



UNITY OF SENSE AND REASON. 



289 



principle and tendency in the universe, not merely imputed' 
to it by arbitrary reflection. 

For Schiller's general position the letters on the /Esthetic 
Education of Humanity give the most complete results... 
Going at once to the heart of his ideas, in his relation to* 
Kant, we find that he believes himself in accord with the 
spirit but not with the letter of the Kantian system. It is 
natural, he says, for a philosopher, as intellectual, to seem to 
treat feeling as a mere hindrance to reason, and this is what 
in the letter Kant appears to do. But in the spirit or inevit- 
able interpretation of his system this is not so, for the sensuous 
impulse must be taken as co-ordinate with, and not subordinate 
to, the rational impulse. The idea of reciprocity, drawn from 
a new work of Fichte, 1 is applied in this account of co-ordina- 
tion, which is also described as reciprocal subordination. 2 In 
short, sense and reason are capable of appearing in harmony 
only because it is their ultimate nature to be in harmony. 
The subjective conception is dropped as untenable in face of 
a complete estimate of man. "In the one-sided moral estimate 
the reason is satisfied when its law has absolute supremacy ; 
in the complete anthropological estimate, in which content 
counts as well as form, and feeling has a voice, the distinction 
[between the suppression and the completion of individuality] 
is of all the more importance. Reason demands unity, 
nature variety, and both systems of legislation lay their 
claims on man." 3 

The " ideal man " 4 is represented by the State, but is not 
realised in his fulness by any state which remaining in ab- 
straction kills out individuality. The alternative and better 
way is that the ideal principle of the state should enter into 
and ennoble the individual till he becomes capable of partici- 
pating in a spiritual unity without sacrificing the natural 
variety which is his element. Even the artist must seem to 
respect his material ; the statesman must do so in reality. 
The point of all this lies in the conception that the " parts," 
whether conceived as the particulars of nature or of feeling, 
or as unsocialised individual human beings, are really in 



1 Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaft, 1794, another of the remarkable 
works that influenced this critical time. 

2 Briefe u. Aesth. Erziehung, No. 13, note. 

3 lb., No. 4. 

4 Again an idea drawn from Fichte, Letter 4, note. 

U 



290 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC 



themselves capable of unity and organization. Here we have 
implied the central principle of idealism, that nothing can be 
made into what it is not capable of being. Therefore when 
certain syntheses and developments are actual it is idle to 
deny that they are objective or immanent in the nature of the 
parts developed. 

The central proof and example of these principles, as well 
as the most effective influence in raising mankind from the 
first nature of savagery to the second of civilization, Schiller 
believes to exist in fine art, which he identifies with general 
refinement of life and manners in a way that is capable of, but 
requires, justification. A single quotation will put his view 
completely before us. 

" Beauty is therefore indeed an object for us, because re- 
flection is the condition under which we have a feeling of it ; but 
at the same time it is a state of our subject, because feeling is the 
condition under which we can have a perception of it. It is 
therefore a form, because w T e contemplate it ; it is life, because 
we feel it. In one word, it is at once our state and our act. 

" And just because it is both of these at once, it serves as 
a triumphant proof that receptivity by no means excludes 
activity, nor matter, form, nor limitation, infinity, — that 
therefore the necessary physical dependence of man in no way 
destroys his moral freedom. It proves this, and, I must add, 
nothing else can prove it. For as in the enjoyment of truth 
or of logical consistency feeling is not necessarily one with 
thought, but follows accidentally upon it, such feeling can 
only prove that a sensuous nature may be sequent upon a 
rational one, and conversely ; not that both can exist together, 
not that they can act reciprocally upon each other, not that 
their union is absolute and necessary. Just the opposite in- 
ference would be more natural. The exclusion of feeling 
while we think, and of thought while we feel, would lead us 
to infer the incompatibility of these two natures, as in fact the 
analytic reasoners can adduce no better evidence that pure 
reason is realisable in humanity than that it is imperative for 
it to be so. But as in the enjoyment of beauty or of aesthetic 
unity there takes place an actual union and interpenetration 
of matter with form and of receptivity with activity, this very 
fact demonstrates the compatibility of the two natures, the 
realisableness of the infinite in the finite, and therefore the 
possibility of the most sublime humanity. 



BEAUTY OBJECTIVE. 



29 I 



" We ought, therefore, no longer to be in perplexity to find 
a passage from sensuous dependence to moral freedom, seeing 
that in beauty a case is given wherein the latter is able per- 
fectly to co-exist with the former, and man is not obliged to 
escape from matter in order to assert himself as spirit. Now 
if man is free without ceasing to be sensuous, 1 as the fact 
of beauty teaches, and if freedom is something absolute and 
supra-sensuous as its idea necessarily involves, then it can 
no longer be a question how he succeeds in ascending from 
the limits [of sense ?] to the absolute, or in opposing himself 
to sensuousness in his thought and will, as in beauty this 
is already accomplished. In one word, the question can no 
longer be how he passes from beauty to truth, seeing that the 
latter as a capacity 2 is already contained in the former, but 
only how he pioneers his path from common to aesthetic 
reality, from mere feelings of life to feelings of beauty." 3 

Little need be added to this passage after our prolonged 
discussion of Kant. We see at once that objectivity is the 
whole root of the import thus ascribed to beauty ; but further 
that it must be such an objectivity as is compatible with exis- 
tence in mind, in perception, in feeling, and in utterance. 
Only it is worth while to observe the extreme logical clearness, 
not usually characteristic of him, with which Schiller appre- 
hends the nature of synthesis. 4 The factors which are to 
be united in the beautiful cannot, he says, be genuinely com- 
bined unless they are first unmistakeably distinguished, and 
then so united that each wholly disappears in the product of 
their union. Unless they disappear in the product, they can- 
not be truly united ; for as they appear in severance they are 
opposed to each other. The term which indicates this dis- 
appearance 5 in a higher import is occasionally used by Goethe 

1 Schiller to Goethe, Br. IV., 3, 262. "Poetry and art have two conditions : 
they must rise above the actual, and remain within the sensuous." 

2 Cf. Letter 21, the passage which excited Mr. Ruskin's indignation by 
affirming that beauty only changes man's whole nature to a free rational or 
second nature, but ' £ discovers no single truth, helps us to fulfil no single 
duty." Cf. Mod. Painters, 2, 134. Mr. Ruskin cannot have had the context 
before him. 

3 Letter 25. 

4 Letter 18. 

5 " Aufgehoben " = preserved by destruction. Schiller goes too far perhaps 
in saying that " no trace of the division must remain in the whole product." 
But it is much easier to understate than to overstate the change effected in 
parts by incorporation in a new whole. 



292 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



in a similar sense ; but the peculiar logical context of this 
passage suggests that its use as a technical term of Hegelian 
dialectic may be due to the " ^Esthetic letters." 

Beauty, then, though subjective, as Kant said, is also 
objective, as he meant. In what positive character, we 
naturally ask, does it manifest itself within human perception 
and activity ? Schiller's answer to this is furnished in the 
kindred ideas of aesthetic semblance and 'of the play-impulse. 
Preserving the fundamental Kantian features of pleasure in 
mere form, and of contrast with practical purpose, respectively, 
Schiller attempts to draw from them important consequences 
relative to the growth of civilization. Much that is true and 
striking is brought forward by him with reference especially 
to the rigid practicality of primitive life, and the advance im- 
plied in such enjoyment as that of seeing for seeing's sake, 
which is coincident with the awakening of the play-impulse, 
the impulse to a purely ideal activity. 1 

a. The doctrine of aesthetic semblance (asthe- 

sSwance Verier Schein) is developed by Schiller out of 
Kant's account of aesthetic form, which, in speak- 
ing of poetry, he also described as a semblance (Schein) that 
is not deceptive. Schiller presses home this idea with con- 
siderable acuteness and with the full powers of his rhetoric, 
and has thus made the Kantian distinction between beauty 
knowledge and practice a common-place of literature, although 
it can hardly be said that he derives from it any substantive 
truth which was not included in Kant's four paradoxes. 
^Esthetic semblance, he insists, is Honest, that is to say, 
makes no pretence at being more than semblance ; and is 
Independent, that is to say, is not such as to be capable of 
enhancement of the pleasure which it gives, through the real 
existence of the object simulated. Real objects may indeed 
be aesthetically contemplated, but only in as far as we dis- 
tinguish their semblance from their existence. And this is a 
harder task than to appreciate the work of art in which this 
separation is performed ready to our hand. 

Thus aesthetic semblance is distinguished at once from de- 
ception, whether sensuous or logical, and from the appetitive 

1 Letter 26. "As soon as man begins to receive pleasure through the eye 
[mit dem Auge zu geniessen], and seeing obtains an independent value for 
him, he has become aesthetically free, and the play-impulse is awakened." 



WHAT IS REALITY ? 



293 



or practical relation to reality ; and by emphasising from an 
anthropological standpoint the gradual growth of an interest 
in the semblance, and the fact that all difficulties, apparently 
connected with representative beauty, really arise not from the 
unreality of the semblance, but from insufficient attention to 
its "honesty," — its confessed unreality — he paves the way for 
a truer conception than Kant possessed of the relative value 
of natural and artistic beauty, and for a definite justification of 
the place held by the beautiful in civilised life. His paradox 
that man is civilised only in proportion as he has learnt 
to value the semblance above the (common-place practical) 
reality is a tremendous reversal of the position taken up by 
Plato, and was influential in the later course of post- Kantian 
speculation. 

There is a difficulty in the psychical distinction which this 
doctrine of semblance may be held to involve. How can one 
kind of sense-perception be set down as semblance, and an- 
other as reality ? Why should visual or auditory sensations be 
taken to belong to form, while those of taste, smell and touch 
are set down as giving sheer reality ? Surely the one group 
are as "objective" or "subjective" as the other! Schiller, 
though successful in the development of doctrines, is not help- 
ful in exactly tracing their roots, and here he falls decidedly 
behind Kant. We saw that in Kants account of the pleasure 
of simple sensations he at least faces this ultimate difficulty 
with perfect candour. He treats aesthetic character as depen- 
dent on the presence of " form " in contrast with mere sensory 
stimulation. And " form," which is for him the essence of 
aesthetic semblance, is a property or nature in sensation dis- 
tinguishable from its mere existence as sense-stimulation. In 
ranking sensations according to aesthetic quality he therefore 
follows a principle which is at least intelligible, and probably 
contains the true basis of the distinction between the aesthetic 
and the non-aesthetic elements in sense. Schiller replaces this 
principle by a more popular phrase. " Reality," he says, ''is 
the work of things ; semblance is the work of man." He 
may mean by this semblance the structural import of any 
perception ; but clearly as it stands the antithesis tells us 
nothing, for every sensation is a reaction of our organism. 
His rhetoric expresses in striking phrases what we commonly 
assume, but does not help us to justify it, "In the eye and 
ear aggressive matter is already hurled back from the sense, 



2 9 4 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



and the object is set at a distance from us, while in the animal 
senses we are directly in contact with it." 1 Here no attempt 
is made to point out in what characteristic of sensations the 
"form" resides, and what constitutes their "reality," The 
distinction between the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic senses, 
which was accepted as a fact by Plato's time, is simply as- 
sumed by Schiller. 

b. The idea of the play-impulse is also obtained 
impulse 7 " through a rhetorical development of suggestions 
made by Kant. It springs from his constant use 
of the term "play," to indicate the free action of the faculties 
in harmony which constitutes aesthetic judgment, and con- 
sequently to denote any mode of succession in time in which 
such sensations as those of music or colour present the charm 
of art. 

In its simplest form, according to the account elaborated by 
Schiller, which strikingly anticipates the ideas of Mr. Herbert 
Spencer, 3 the play-impulse is the mere discharge of accumu- 
lated energy which demands a vent. " The animal plays 
when the superfluity of life pricks itself into activity." 
In a higher phase it may be said to arise when man awakes 
to the pleasure of seeing for its own sake. 3 When he has 
thus noted the "form" or "semblance," it is only one step 
further to confer independence on it by imitation. No doubt 
the anthropological sequence is wrong at this point ; imitation 
is much older than conscious enjoyment of form ; but it is 
plain that the connection which Schiller insists on is real, and 
the only difficulty is the eternally recurrent one of distinguish- 
ing degrees of consciousness in a developing activity. At 
every point the play-impulse and the imitative or dramatic 
tendency — the tendency to enjoy simulation or semblance — 
are closely connected, and it seems true that in all games and 
amusements there is involved a certain mimicry of life. 4 

Schiller's further account of the growth of art and the 
feeling for beauty, as the play-impulse gradually filling up its 
empty sense of freedom with a content of expression, is full of 



1 Br., 26. 

- 2 Br., 27. Cf. H. Spencer, Psychology, ii. 627. Was Schiller the " German 
author " there mentioned ? 

3 Br., 26. 

4 Br., 15. Cf. Prof. Brown, The Fine Arts, Pt. I. 



THE PLAY-IMPULSE. 



295 



suggestions which later theory has realised, more particularly 
as to the aspect which seems most alien to the play-idea pure 
and simple — the nature of the beautifying instinct as applied 
to objects of use or necessity. " What 1 he (man just passing 
from sensuous to aesthetic 'play') possesses, what he pro- 
duces, must no longer bear merely the traces of utility, the 
over-careful impress of a purpose ; 2 besides the service, for 
which it exists, it must also reflect the ingenious understand- 
ing which contrived it, the loving hand which executed it, the 
free and cheerful mind which chose and set it up to look at. 

Even his weapons are no longer to be objects of 
terror only, but they are to give pleasure also, and the 
cunningly wrought sword belt claims no less attention than 
the mortal edge of the sword." 3 

Finally the history of the play-impulse develops into an 
analysis of the social character of art, resting ultimately upon 
ideas thrown out by Kant in connection with social interest 
in beauty, 4 and the essential communicability of aesthetic 
feeling. " We cannot universalise either our sensuous or our 
intellectual pleasures, for the former are essentially individual, 
the latter neglect the deep-seated bases of personality. In 
beauty alone we are at once the individual and the race ; it 
can make the whole world happy, and every being forgets its 
limitations while under the spell of the beautiful. 5 

The defect of a play-theory of the beautiful is its tendency 
to cut life in two between work and play. " Ernst ist das 
Leben, heiter ist die Kunst " is a jarring sentiment, unless we 
interpret it so largely that the natural associations of the words 
are gone. Towards such a theory Schiller seems at times to 
be drifting 6 under stress of the metaphor which he' adopts. 
The two real links between beauty and the play-impuke are 



1 Br., 27. 

2 It is easy to see how in every phrase Schiller's rhetoric rests upon Kant's 
logic. 

3 See Mr. W. G. Collingwood's Philosophy of Ornament for a sketch and 
appreciative account of the reindeer dagger-haft of the Dordogne. 

4 Krit d. U., sect. 41, where most of Schiller's account of progressive- 
refinement is anticipated. 

5 Br., 27, Cp. 

" Deine Zauber binden wieder 
Was die Mode streng getheilt." 

— From Schiller's Hymn to Gladness. 

6 E.g. Br., 15, end. 



HISTORY OF AESTHETIC. 



their common freedom from practical ends, and their common 
tendency to simulation or, in the very largest sense, the ideal 
treatment of reality. In other respects "play" suggests to 
us amusement and the relaxation of our faculties, and seems 
not to do justice to the serious need of self-utterance, nor to 
the element of expressiveness involved in all work in which 
the craftsman has any degree of freedom. The play-impulse 
is in short only aesthetic where its primarily negative free- 
dom is charged with a content which demands imaginative 
expression ; and any impulse w T hich takes such a form is 
-aesthetic, whether or no it chances to remind us of " play." 

Thus "the Kantian Schiller," 1 by his enthusiasm no less 
than by his genius, has not only affirmed the objectivity of 
the beautiful, but has vindicated its place and value in the 
evolution of civilised man. By so doing he followed and 
also stimulated the growing tendency to understand by 
objectivity and truth something more than mere fact and 
correctness, and to find the truest reality in that which has 
a meaning and a causal influence within the sphere of human 
life. 

opposition of 2 - Having recognised the beautiful as a real 
'' ^ntique^and ex p ress ion of man's being, uniting the extremes 
of his mind, and continuous from the first dawn 
of civilisation, Schiller could hardly avoid directing" his atten- 
tion to the contrast of the antique and the modern which 
seemed to contradict this continuity. Such a contrast, we 
.saw in chapter 9, was the historical or actual shape in which 
the inherent dualism of man's nature forced itself on the 
attention of an age which had become aware of the past. 
From the time of Dante downward, some kind of answer had 
been demanded to the question, whether the life of antiquity 
rested on the same principles as that of the modern world, or 
on better, or on worse. As knowledge was gathered and 
free intelligence awoke, the consciousness of this antagonism 
became more profound, and the efforts to resolve it more 
adequate. In the chapter referred to, I attempted to give 
:Some picture of the process by which the common humanity 
of the ancient w r orld revealed itself to the modern, more 
especially through literature to Lessing and through plastic 
= art to Winckelmann. I endeavoured to show that each of 



Hartmann, s£st7i., i. 24. 



ANTIQUE AND MODERN. 



297 



these great interpreters, though in some degree taken cap- 
tive by the objects of his study, and inclined to ascribe 
finality to their temporary conditions, nevertheless found 
within these limits enough significance and variety to sug- 
gest the relativity of the beautiful to human nature, and the 
interpretation of its oneness in accordance with that rela- 
tivity. The work of scholarship and archaeology was tending, 
as we saw, in the same direction. But yet on the whole, be- 
fore Lessing's death, the reaction of the later Renaissance was 
hardly spent. The pseudo-Hellenic tradition, though widened 
and humanised into a genuine Hellenic enthusiasm, still 
imposed upon the age. " Gothic " art was not understood. 
Lessing's Aristotelian defence of Shakespeare operated to 
reinforce as well as to deepen the principles of classical 
taste. It was not till the age of genius against which Les- 
sing so hotly protested, that the full meaning of modern art 
came home to the German mind. Goethe, as Bernays says, 
" liberated the century." 

Besides the definite influences which have been mentioned, 
the French revolution was filling the air with electricity. 
" Freedom " was a word with a meaning in 1795, and the 
work of Kant, Schiller, and their successors, in bringing 
down freedom from a metaphysical heaven to terrestrial life, 
had an import for their contemporaries which we are apt to 
forget. 

Did the principles of beauty as hitherto understood, accord- 
ing to the tradition of the Renaissance gradually widening 
into a true Hellenic sympathy — did these principles fairly 
cover the aesthetic judgments and productions of that tumul- 
tuous age ? It is interesting to note in the words of Goethe 
how this antagonism took form in the intercourse between 
Schiller and himself. 1 

" How curious it was [Schiller's relation to Kant] appeared 
fully when my connection with Schiller became animated. 
Our conversation dealt entirely with our work or with 
theory, usually both together ; he preached the gospel of 
freedom, I defended the rights of nature from curtailment. 
Out of goodwill to me, perhaps, rather than from conviction, 
he refrained from treating the good mother (Nature) in the 
/Esthetic letters with the unkind expressions which made the 



" Einwirkung d. neueren Philosophic" JVerke, xxx. 341. 



HISTORY OF ^ESTHETIC. 



paper ' Anmuth u. Wiirde ' 1 so odious to me. But as I on 
my side obstinately and perversely extolled the advantages 
of the Greek mode of poetry, and of that founded upon it or 
derived from it, and not only so, but asserted that manner to 
be the exclusively right and desirable one, he was forced 
to more precise reflection, and it was to this very dispute 
that we owe the treatise, Ueber naive u. sentiment aie Dich- 
tung} The two modes of poetry, he concluded, were to be 
co-ordinate and acknowledge each others claims. 

" By this he laid the first foundation of the whole new 
development of ^Esthetic ; for ' Hellenic ' and ' Romantic,' 
and any other synonyms that may have been invented, are 
all derivable from that discussion, in which the original ques- 
tion had concerned the predominance of real, or of ideal 
treatment." 

Kant in his " Observations" briefly describes the "Naive" 3 
as "the noble and beautiful simplicity which bears the im- 
press of Nature, and not of Art." This rather than the fuller 
account in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, was adopted 
by Schiller as the point of departure for his distinction. In 
both cases, however, Kant is referring primarily to social 
intercourse. Schiller on the contrary, applying the idea 
within the limits of Art, is obliged in some degree to modify 
its relation to Nature. The root of his antitheism is expressed 
when he says that the poet either is Nature or seeks Nature ; 
the former is the Naive and the latter the Sentimental poet. 4 
But the sense in which a poet can be Nature is doubtful, and 
the poles of the contrast tend to approximate. For if the 
Naive means an intentional and conscious self-identification 
with Nature — and in Art it must tend to that meaning — it at 
once becomes difficult to distinguish from sentimentality, and 
the two are at least co-ordinate if not identical. This is cer- 
tainly true of the sense of the Naive which Schiller traces in 
the decadence of art and among the most artificial nations, 
e.g. the French. Such a sense is a species of the sentimental, 
and so far we are off the track of the distinction between 
ancient and modern. 

But in spite of this difficulty Schiller succeeds by a really 
brilliant critical enquiry in establishing a difference, within the 
region of art, between Nature at first hand and Nature at 



1 1 793 (?)• 2 1795-6. 3 IV., iv. 420. 4 JV.yXii 231. 



SCHILLER ON SHAKESPEARE. 



299 



second hand. There was, he points out, among the Greeks, 
little sentimental interest in external Nature — the purest case 
of the natural. Their unity with the world did not admit of 
reflection. Even in dealing with man they show an analo- 
gous freshness and directness. Schiller's comparison 1 of the 
meeting between Glaucus and Diomede in the Iliad with that 
between Ferrau and Rinaldo in Ariosto, is as felicitous as 
any example in Lessing or in Matthew Arnold. The principle 
of the implied antithesis is obvious, and forms the basis of 
all later dealing with the history of art. We shall have to 
dwell upon it in treating of Schelling and Hegel, and need 
not therefore discuss it here. 

That however there are modern " naive " poets Schiller 
himself points out, having Goethe among others in his mind ; 
and he adds that they are exceedingly inconvenient to criticism 
by confounding all its distinctions. They do in fact point to 
a higher unity, of which Schiller gives no sufficient account, 
beyond the schism of merely romantic art. But his primary 
idea could not be better illustrated than by his confession 
of his own early difficulties in appreciating Shakespeare. 
" When 2 at a very early age I first became acquainted with 
him, I was indignant at his coldness, his insensibility, which 
permitted him to jest in the moments of highest emotion, to 
let the clown break in upon the most heart-rending scenes 
in Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth. . . . Misled by my ac- 
quaintance with recent poetry so as in every work to look 
first for the poet, to meet him heart to heart, and to reflect 
with him upon his object, in short to look at the object only 
as it is reflected in the subject, I found it intolerable that 
here the poet never showed himself and w T ould never let me 
question him. . . . I was not yet capable of understanding 
Nature at first hand. I could only endure the picture of it 
as reflected through the understanding, and to that end the 
French sentimental poets and the Germans from 1 750-1 780 
were the right people for me." Here we trace the connection 
of Naive and Realistic, Sentimental and Idealistic treatment, 
which is emphasised elsewhere in the treatise, and which 
Goethe, as we saw, considered to have been its starting- 
point. We may add, to show that the principles affecting 
poetry and other art were closely connected in Schiller's mind, 



1 IF., xii. 226. 



* lb., 226. Schasler, 1. 635. 



300 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



that in a criticism on an exhibition of pictures upon set 
subjects which Goethe had initiated he writes as to "The 
other German attribute, of sentimentality," " A tearful Hector 
and a melting Andromache were to be feared, and they are 
not absent." 1 

The ancients, he concludes, were great by limitation, the 
moderns by infinity, a distinction verbally reproduced by 
Schelling and possessing the same importance for later philo- 
sophy as the contrast of "naive" and "sentimental" itself, 
which it simply reiterates in a generalized technical form. 
The advance made by Schiller consisted in placing the antique 
and modern principles on an equality, as stages in a natural 
evolution. His predecessors had not fairly and fully ad- 
mitted the difference between them, but even when they 
recognised the greatness of the moderns, had endeavoured 
to force them into the mould of the ancients. It was Schiller 
who inaugurated the idea that it is not necessary to reduce 
differences to a vanishing point in order to assert continuity 
of principle. 

sohiegeion 3- The treatise on naive and sentimental poetry 
schmer. soon produced its effect. In 1797 there appeared 
Fr. v. Schlegefs Essays on the Study of Greek Poetry, 2 with 
a preface, which, referring to Schiller's treatise, declared that 
the principles of objective beauty could not be held to apply 
to modern poetic art. For, in defiance of the maxim that beauty 
must give a disinterested pleasure, the poet now relies on sub- 
jective fascination, poetic "effect," and an interest in the exis- 
tence of the ideal ; these are his essentially "sentimental" 
characters. It will at once be seen that Kant's abstraction 
from positive content, by which he set down a relation to the 
ideal as impurity in aesthetic judgment, here recoils on the 
theory of the beautiful with destructive effect. Schlegel 
further points out that the sentimental mood becomes poetry 
only through the characteristic, that is, through the repre- 
sentation of what is individual. Otherwise, I presume he 
must mean, it can have no plastic or structural form adequate 
to the depth of individual emotion which is its material. 
Thus Greek Tragedy, he thinks, might claim the title of 
objective, as conforming to the accepted canons of a beauti- 
ful whole ; while Shakespearian tragedy, " which organises 



1 IK, xii. 388. 



2 W., 5. 



SCHLEGEL ON UGLINESS. 



,OI 



out of sentimental and characteristic elements a self-complete 
and perfectly self-dependent interesting whole," should go by 
the name of " interesting tragedy." This name is therefore 
intended by Schlegel to take the art to which it applies out 
of the category of beauty as determined by Kant and by the 
lovers of antiquity. Whether such an exclusion was sub- 
stantially justified by Kant's theory is another question. It 
is not certain that Shakespearian tragedy implies even an 
interest in the reality of an ideal in the sense which Kant 
considered extra-aesthetic. It may be doubtful whether 
Schlegel clearly appreciated the distinction between pleasure 
in aesthetic semblance and pleasure in the reality of objects 
or ideals, the latter of which alone is to be considered an 
unaesthetic interest. Rightly or wrongly, however, Schlegel, 
in handling this distinction borrowed from Schiller, ranks 
Shakespeare, not like Schiller, with the ancients, but as the 
very centre and standard-bearer of the moderns. It seems 
plain, as hinted above, that both critics are right. Shake- 
speare points to a modern art which shall transcend romantic 
dualism and again be classical. 

In this same volume, for the first time in the history of 
aesthetic, mention is made of the " Theory of Ugliness." 1 
Beauty is defined as "the pleasant manifestation of the good" ; 
ugliness as "the unpleasant manifestation of the bad.' We 
must suppose that an unpleasant manifestation of the good 
and a pleasant manifestation of the bad are taken to be im- 
possible. The attempt is thus made to regard ugliness as 
wholly outside beauty and corresponding to it as its embodied 
negation. But Schlegel soon finds that the positive embodi- 
ment of a negation is a troublesome conception to handle, 2 
and that in as far as it is positive the intensest ugliness will 
need the very greatest powers to represent it, and will always 
contain elements of the beautiful. The distinction which 
might meet this obvious difficulty does not seem to occur to 
him. The positive negation will be, so we should say, in 
some degree a confusion — a parody or perversion of the type 
of beauty to which it is correlative. 

schnier on 4. The very inconsistency however of Schle- 

scniegei. gel's suggestions makes them an indication of a 
rapid revolution, both in taste and in theory. A remarkable 



1 W., 5, p. 147. 



P. 151. 



HISTORY OF AESTHETIC. 



letter from Schiller to Goethe 1 shows the effect, probably of 
this very work of Schlegel, on the further history of the pro- 
blem. Schiller will not put up with the dualism which 
(exaggerating his own antithesis) modern writers are labour- 
ing to introduce ; but yet he is so far impressed by their 
contention that he is inclined to abandon the term beauty 
altogether, and choose another word of less narrow associa- 
tions. I quote the entire passage. 

" I fancy that this would be the right moment to pass in 
review the w T orks of Greek art, in the light of the idea of the 
characteristic ; for Winckelmann's and Lessing's conception is 
still generally prevalent, and our most recent writers on 
aesthetic, dealing with poetry as well as with sculpture, take 
endless pains to liberate Greek beauty from all traces of the 
characteristic, and to make this latter the distinctive mark of 
modern art. I think the recent aesthetic writers, in their 
struggles to separate the idea of beauty and present it in a 
certain purity, have pretty nearly hollowed it out, and turned 
it into an empty sound. The opposition between the beauti- 
ful and the correct or true [' Treffende '] has been pushed 
much too far, and a demarcation which only the philosopher 
is in the habit of making (and which is only justifiable in one 
aspect), has been accepted far too coarsely. 

" Many, again, make another kind of mistake, in referring 
the idea of beauty far too much to the content of the work of 
art instead of to the treatment of it ; and then of course they 
must be puzzled when they have to comprehend under the 
same idea of beauty the Apollo of the Vatican and other 
figures like it, of which the content is enough to make them 
beautiful, with the Laocoon, or a Faun, or other painful or 
ignoble representations. 

" As you know, the same is the case with poetry. How 
people have toiled and are still toiling to justify the crude and 
frequently low and ugly realism [' Natur,' the natural facts, 
whether of man's behaviour, or of other kinds] of Homer and 
the tragedians, in consonance with the idea they have formed 
of Greek beauty. I wish some one would at last venture to 
dismiss from circulation this idea and the word beauty itself, 
to which all those false notions are, in fact, inseparably 



1 Br.-wechsel, 3. 158. July, 1797. 



Schiller's feeling for beauty. 



attached, and, as is reasonable, to set up in its place truth in 
the completest sense of the word." 

Truth, of course, is not here to be taken in an intellectual 
sense. The "Kantian" Schiller knows better than that. 
What the passage means is, first, that he is quite sure that the 
pseudo-classical idea of beauty cannot be stretched so as to 
cover romantic art ; and secondly, looking back upon Greek 
art in the light of romanticism, he is inclined to believe that 
even for it the current idea of the beautiful is much too 
narrow. Therefore he thinks a new term must be chosen, 
which merely indicates the need of expression and of a 
matter to be expressed, and he sees that this characteristic 
matter will be found among the Greeks as in modern art. 
Now that the valuable quality of art, whether we call it 
" beauty " or by some other name, is understood to be a neces- 
sary and objective expression of human life and the unity of 
nature, there is no reason for trying to narrow the scope of its 
manifestations. And therefore the thinker who was the first 
to proclaim its concrete objectivity was also the first who in 
set terms discarded all formal' and traditional limitations to the 
compass of its unity. 

In the reign of formative art and of music Schiller had no 
special powers of appreciation. He made no positive contri- 
bution to the theory of specific arts 1 or of their relations with 
each other. His sympathy for landscape seems not to have 
been wider than that of his generation. 2 He treats a thunder- 
storm, 3 with its gloom abruptly broken by lightning, as a case 
of the ugly whose effect is sublime or rather exalting (" Erhe- 
bend"). He restricts the conception of grace to movements 
of the human form. 4 He does not give important aid even in 
the discrimination of particular forms of poetry. He pro- 
nounces the plot of Corneille's Cid undoubtedly the best in 
literature because it demands no wickedness. 5 His real 
achievement lay in the sphere of the general principles of 
poetic fancy which are the foundation of all the individual arts 
and are profoundly connected with the springs of life and 
thought. 



1 See Schasler, i. 626. 

2 See however the Review of Mattheson's poems, W., xii. 343. Cf. Schasler, 
1. 648. 

3 IV. f xi. 570, 1. 4 See Schasler, 1. 603. 5 IF., xi. 543. 



304 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



II. To the student of Goethe there will appear 
to be something like profanity in the attempt to 
confine his magnificent profusion of ideas within the limits of 
aesthetic formula. And it must clearly be understood that in 
the following pages there is no pretence of gathering the full 
harvest of his immense activity, but only an effort to insist 
upon some dominant convictions the importance of which is 
avouched by the whole course of his ideas concerning art and 
beauty. The English reader who turns hopefully, for an 
appreciation of Goethe's aesthetic position, to the most recent 
and able historians among his countrymen, will experience 
a sharp disappointment. By common agreement he is 
treated as a popular writer of the school of Winckelmann, 
and thus finds no place at all in Hartmann's post- Kantian 
history, 1 while in Schasler 2 and Zimmermann 3 alike he is 
divorced from Schiller and annexed to Mengs and Winckel- 
mann as a pre- Kantian aesthetician. Such a view, though 
superficially favoured by the order of treatment which Hegel 
has adopted for a special purpose, 4 is absolutely at variance 
with chronology, with Goethe's fundamental ideas and his re- 
corded judgment of his own relation to Kant, 5 and with his 
place as the central figure of that creative time, the last 
decade 6 of the eighteenth century, when the ideas of a new 
philosophy were forged by co-workers whose individual con- 
tributions can hardly be distinguished to-day. 

The ground of these contradictory estimates is very simple, 
and forms a convenient introduction to the study of Goethe's 
conceptions. Winckelmann, of course, detected the inevitable 
impact of expression upon beauty. By insisting upon all that 
we now understand as "expression" it is verbally possible to 
find in him a doctrine of the significant or characteristic, which 
in reality he did but apprehend darkly and remotely. Now 
there is no doubt at all that Goethe's reflections upon beauty 
and especially upon art are centrally determined by the anti- 
thesis of beauty in the narrower sense and significance or 



1 v. Hartmarin, /Esfh ,\. Einl. vii. 

2 Krit. G. d. A., i. 494. 

3 Aesth., i. 355. 

4 lb., i. 24. 

5 Einwirkung d. neueren Philosophies IV., 30. 340. 

6 lb., " Diese fur mich so bedeutende Epoche, das letzte Zehnt des ver- 
gangenen Jahrbunderts." 



GOETHE AND WINCKELM ANN. 305 



character. It is therefore possible to speak of him as dealing 
with Winckelmann's problem and nothing more. 

But such a view neglects the whole essence of the matter. 
Winckelmann started from abstract beauty, but was compelled, 
by his historical knowledge and sympathy, to supplement it 
by a graded intrusion of the expressive, which though neces- 
sary to the beautiful, increases as true beauty diminishes. He 
remained almost wholly within the domain of plastic art, 
having just a word to say on painting, but not a word on 
music or poetry. But Goethe, if he dealt with similar ele- 
ments, approached them in the reverse order. His point of 
departure was the idea of the characteristic as the excellent 
in art, that is to say, as the beautiful in the wider sense of the 
word which we have determined to adhere to. This principle 
he supplemented at a later time by the limiting postulate of 
formal beauty, beauty in the narrower sense, chiefly as a safe- 
guard against misunderstandings and eccentricities. This 
reversal of Winckelmann's position is essential, not accidental. 
It was the outcome of the new organ of aesthetic perception 
which Winckelmann had helped to create, and the germ of 
a wider and deeper sense of beauty. It originated in the 
defence of Gothic architecture against the effete pseudo- 
classical tradition, and was supported by the widest apprecia- 
tion of painting, music, and poetry. In technical philosophy 
its significance is quite unmistakable. Beauty — the excellence 
revealed in art and aesthetic appreciation generally — is the 
datum to be analysed. To assume the unanalysed datum, or 
its most formal analysis, as a principle, while confessing that 
another and a thoroughly concrete principle is perplexingly 
active within and outside it, is candid and suggestive, but 
logically impotent. To identify the datum with a concrete 
principle which leads to a profound analysis, while admitting 
that there is still a border line at which a formal residue of 
the datum fails to be adequately explained, is a new step in 
scientific comprehension. We will now consider Goethe's 
aesthetic convictions in the latter aspect. 

Gothic i- In 1773, twenty-four years before Hirt's 

Architecture. f am0 us article in Horen upon the Beautiful of Art 
as the Characteristic, there appeared a small, badly-printed, 
anonymous book, 1 von Detitscher Art u. Kunst, " On German 



Scherer, ii. 82. 



X 



3 o6 



HISTORY OF AESTHETIC. 



style and art." The authors were Moser, Herder, and Goethe. 
The contribution of the latter was the short paper, " Deutsche 
Baukunst," "German architecture," which in spite of an excess 
in youthful rhetoric — Goethe was only twenty-four when it 
was published — is perhaps the profoundest aesthetic utterance 
of the eighteenth century. For in it we have the germ of 
those ideas which were to find their full expression eighty 
years after in the chapter, " On the Nature of Gothic," in Mr. 
Ruskin's Stones of Venice. I fear that the indifference of our 
philosophic historians to the former utterance is but too well 
explained by their unfamiliarity with the latter, and all that it 
implies. The relation of all work to the life of the individual 
workman is not indeed insisted on by Goethe, but the point 
of view which he adopted was one in which this relation was 
necessarily involved. I will make a few extracts from this 
short paper, which does not, so far as I am aware, exist in an 
English translation. The points to be noted for our theoreti- 
cal purpose are : — 

i. The writer's attitude towards the pseudo-classicism of 
the late Renaissance. 

ii. The sympathy for "Gothic" architecture, and criticism of 
the kind of disparagement which the name implies. 1 

iii. The indication of a theory of characteristic art. 

I will arrange the quotations under these three heads. The 
subject of the paper is Strasburg cathedral. 
Attitude to the i. <<< It is in petty taste,' says the Italian, and 

Tradition, passes by. ' Quite childish,' lisps the Frenchman, 
and triumphantly taps his snuff-box a la Grecque. What have 
you both done, that you should despise it ? 

Has not the genius of the ancients, arising from their grave, 
cast yours into captivity ? You crawled under the mighty 
ruins to steal their proportions, you built your patchwork 
palaces with the sacred fragments, and deem yourself custodian 
of the arcana of art, because you can give account of colossal 
buildings by inch and line. If you had felt more than 
measured, if you had caught the spirit of the masses which 
astounded you, you would not simply have copied, because 
they did it, and it is beautiful ; you would have made your 
designs necessary and true, and living beauty would have 
sprung from them with creative power. 



1 Cf. Stones of Venice, vol. ii., "On Nature of Gothic." 



STRASBURG CATHEDRAL. 



307 



" So you have painted your wants with a show of truth and 
beauty. The splendid effect of the columns impressed you ; 
you wanted to have columns too, and you built them into 
walls ; you wanted to have colonnades, and you surrounded 
the forecourt of St. Peter's Church with marble passages 
which lead nowhere, so that mother Nature, who detests and 
despises the useless and unnecessary, impelled your populace 
to prostitute them to public cloacae, till you avert your eyes 
and hold your nose before the wonder of the world. 

" All this goes on its way ; the artist's whim serves the rich 
man's caprice ; the tourist stares, and our beaux esprit s, called 
philosophers, elaborate their art-principles and art-histories 
out of protoplastic fables, while true men are murdered by the 
evil genius in the forecourt of the mysteries." 1 . 

" . The column 2 is in no sense an element of our 

dwellings ; it contradicts the essence of all our buildings. Our 
houses do not arise out of four columns at four corners ; they 
arise out of four walls on four sides, which serve instead of 
columns, exclude columns, and, where you add them, make 
them a burdensome superfluity." " Beware of dishonouring 
the name of your noblest artist, and hasten to contemplate his 
excellent work. If it gives you an unpleasing impression, or 
none at all, why then fare you well ; harness your horses and 
away to Paris ! " We trace in all this the same coincidence of 
genuine racial art-feeling and regrettable national antagonism 
which so strongly influenced Lessing. It was inevitable that 
the modern spirit should grow fierce as it turned against 
the tradition which fettered it in every movement. We saw 
before that St. Peter's has always been a touchstone of 
Renaissance feeling. Goethe cannot have been the first 
hostile critic, for at this time he had not seen Rome, and his 
information must have been drawn from other writers. But 
his readiness to blaspheme is a striking sign of the times. 
" Gothic " as a h\ "When I first went to see the cathedral, 
disparaging term. m y head was full of general conceptions of good 
taste. I reverenced, from hearsay, harmony of masses 
and purity of form, and was a sworn foe to the confused 
caprices of Gothic decoration. Under the rubric ' Gothic,' 
like an article in a dictionary, I had collected all the mistaken 



1 Winckelmann was murdered 1768. 

2 Directed against the Abbe Laugier, Scherer, vol. ii., " Goethe." 



3 o8 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



synonyms that had ever come into my head, ' undefined, dis- 
ordered, unnatural, a heap of odds and ends, patchwork, 
overloaded.' No wiser than a people that called the whole 
world ' barbarians ' I called everything Gothic that did not 
fit my system, from the elaborate doll and image work with 
which our bourgeois aristocracy decorate their houses, to the 
grave remains of old German architecture, which in view of 
a few bizarre curves, I censured to the old tune as * Quite 
overloaded with ornament ' ; and so, on my way, I shuddered 
at what I expected to see, a misformed, curly-bristled monster. 

" How unexpected was the feeling with which the sight 
amazed me, when I stood before the building. My soul was 
filled by a great and complete impression, which because it 
was composed of a thousand harmonious details, I was able 
to taste and enjoy, but in no way to understand and explain. 
How constantly I returned to enjoy this half-heavenly plea- 
sure, to comprehend in their work the giant-spirit of our elder 
brothers ! . . . How often has the evening twilight inter- 
rupted with friendly rest the eye fatigued by its exploring 
gaze, when the countless parts melted into complete masses, 
which, simple and great, stood before my soul, and my powers 
arose gladly at once to enjoy and to understand. 
How freshly it greeted me in the morning brilliance, how 
gladly I observed the great harmonious masses, vitalised 
in their numberless minute parts, as in the works of eternal 
nature, down to the smallest fibre, all of it form, and all 
bearing upon the whole ; how lightly the enormous firm- 
based building rises into the air ; how broken it is, and yet 
how eternal ! And so do I not well to be angry 

when the German art-scholar, giving ear to envious neigh- 
bours, mistakes his own advantage, and disparages this work 
with the unintelligible term ' Gothic,' when he should be 
thanking God that he is able to proclaim aloud, ' This is 
German building, our building, of which the Italians have 
none, still less the French.' And if you will not concede your- 
self this privilege, prove that the Goths really built like this, 
in which proof you will find some difficulty." . . . " But 
you, dear youth, shall be my companion, you who stand there 
in emotion, unable to reconcile the contradictions which con- 
flict in your soul ; who now feel the irresistible power of the 
great totality, and now chide me for a dreamer, that I see 
beauty, where you see only strength and roughness." 



THE CHARACTERISTIC. 



309 



The continuation of the same passage suggests a general 
theory to justify this "perception of beauty" where others 
see only strength and roughness. The force of customary 
language takes Goethe back into the antithesis which he has 
just transcended. But we must bear in mind throughout that 
beauty in the largest sense always tends to coincide, as 
Goethe has just employed the term, with the whole excellence 
which belongs to fine art, qua fine art, and is appreciated by 
aesthetic perception, qua aesthetic. Even in Winckelmann we 
saw that " true " beauty falls outside that which is especially 
and distinctively called by the name of beauty, just as Goethe 
is about to oppose "true" and "great" art to "beautiful" 
art in the narrower sense. 

"Characteristic" iii- (Continued after "roughness" above.) "Do 
Art - not let a misconception come between us ; do not 
let the effeminate doctrine of the modern beautymonger make 
you too tender to enjoy significant roughness, lest in the end 
your enfeebled feeling should be able to endure nothing but 
unmeaning smoothness. They try to make you believe that 
the fine arts arose from our supposed inclination to beautify 
the world around us. That is not true ! For in the only 
sense in which it could be true it may be asserted by a citizen 
or artisan, but not by a philosopher." (The art-impulse, as 
Goethe is about to describe it, would be called an impulse to 
beautify things, only by those who include all formative work 
under beauty, as a citizen may the laying out of a new street, 
or an artisan the construction of a machine. Goethe's mood 
as here expressed is very complex ; he sympathises in sub- 
stance with the " citizen," but yet feels that he can only make 
his point clear through the distinction, in itself objectionable, 
which the philosopher draws. Such, at least, appears to me 
the true meaning of the passage.) 

"Art (he continues) is formative long before it is beautiful 
(fine), and yet is then true and great art, very often truer and 
greater than beautiful art itself. For man has in him a for- 
mative nature, which displays itself in activity as soon as his 
existence is secure ; so soon as he is free from care and from 
fear, the demi-god, active in repose, gropes round him for 
matter into which to breathe his spirit. And so the savage 
remodels with bizarre traits, horrible forms, and coarse 
colours, his " cocos," his feathers, and his own body. And 
though this imagery consists of the most capricious forms 



HISTORY OF .ESTHETIC. 



yet, without relations of shape, its parts will agree together ; 
for a single feeling has created them into a characteristic 
whole. 

Now this characteristic art is the only true art. When it 
acts on what lies round it from inward, single, individual, 
independent feeling, careless and even ignorant of all that is 
alien to it, then whether born of rude savagery or of cul- 
tivated sensibility, it is whole and living. Of this you see 
numberless degrees among nations and individuals. The 
more that the soul rises to the feeling of those relations which 
alone are beautiful and eternal, whose main chords can be 
demonstrated, whose secrets can only be felt, relations in 
which alone the life of the godlike genius rushes forth into 
happy melodies ; the more that this beauty penetrates the 
being of a mind, seeming to be of one origin with it, so that 
the mind can tolerate nothing else, and produce nothing else ; 
so much the happier is the artist. . . . Here stands his work ; 
approach, and recognise the deepest feeling of truth and 
beauty in relations issuing from a strong rough German soul, 
on the narrow and gloomy sacerdotal arena of the middle 
age." And below, after attacking the affected and feeble 
painting of his own days, " masculine Albert Diirer, whom 
the moderns mock at, the most wooden of your forms please 
me better." 

Now it is true that this early love for Gothic buildings was 
driven into the background in Goethe's mind by his inclina- 
tion to "a more developed art " (that of the Greeks), as he 
tells us in his autobiography 1 (1811). This mention of the 
subject, however, shows how near it was to his heart, for it 
was in this particularly that his later life seemed to him to 
link itself to the impulses of his early years. The proverb, 
" What we wish for in youth is given us abundantly in age," 
is verified for him by this connection. Again, the order of 
development in Faust must strike every one as analogous to 
the poet's own history, the devotion to Helena being super- 
imposed upon the basis of northern life, and leaving its in- 
fluence behind when the contact ceases. 

The approximation between art and science, by which, for 
good and evil, Goethe was so greatly fascinated, consisted for 
him in their common relation to the typical and the charac- 



1 W. 3 17. 348. 



MEYER AND HIRT. 



teristic. The Critique of the Power of Judgment^ with which 
alone of Kant's writings he really sympathised, confirmed his 
conviction of this affinity, and justified in his eyes the " restless 
impulse " which had always led him to search for the typical or 
the fundamental. 1 In all this his thought is close to the 
" characteristic," as understood by science as well as in art. 
Some genera of flowers, for example, seem to him full of 
character, others vaguely defined and characterless. His 
researches into the metamorphoses of plants were guided of 
course by ideas of an underlying type. It is quite plain that 
the import, character or significance, was always for Goethe 
the central point in any work which appealed to man, and 
even, though subject to a Kantian reservation, in any product 
of nature. 

Definitions of 2. But it is quite in accordance with Goethe's 
Hirt and Meyer, dislike of the abstract and incomplete that we find 
the idea of the " characteristic," as a substantive principle of 
art, entering into aesthetic not through him, but through h'is 
friends Hirt, a critic, and Meyer, an artist, both travellers 
and learned in the facts of art, and both contributors to 
Horen 2 (1795-8). 

Their opinions are adduced and criticised by Hegel in the 
Introduction to the Aesthetic? Meyer who followed Goethe 
in a relative antagonism to Hirt, fancied that the view which 
he and Goethe shared was fundamentally different from that 
which Hirt maintained. But there is really no profound dis- 
tinction between them, beyond the limitation retained by 
Goethe which we have already noticed, the super-addition of 
beauty to significance as a condition under which the latter 
must appear in art." Hirt, echoing Baumgarten, identified 
the beautiful with the perfect for eye or ear ; but he developed 
the idea of perfection into that of the intention of nature as 
expressed in generic or specific characters. Meyer, following 
Goethe, laid down that the principle of (ancient 4 ) art was the 
significant, but the result of successful treatment was the 



1 " Einw. d. n. P/ulos." and " Anschauende Urtheilskr." IV., 30. 342 and 
35i- 

2 Die Horen, a review in which Schiller and Goethe co-operated. It was 
above the reading public at that time, and lived only three years. 

3 JEst/i., i. 23, E. Tr. 32 ff. 

4 See Schiller's letter above. Hirt's aggressive attitude had forced the 
question of the characteristic to be raised even about ancient art. 



312 



HISTORY OF /ESTHETIC. 



beautiful. Both of these formulae, as Hegel points out, 
depend essentially on the relation of content to form and 
affirm to begin with that the excellence of art consists in 
expression adequate to a meaning. In describing the nature 
of this meaning there is, we find, a tendency of the extremes 
to meet, for characterisation which is merely generic or specific 
and not individual leans to the side of abstraction and 
classicism as against individualism and romanticism, and 
points back to Reynolds' arguments in favour of his grand 
style. And the postulate of "beauty in treatment" may 
indicate either that the individual is to be conventionalised, 
or that beauty can be found in individuality by those who 
have eyes to see. We shall find the antithesis more fully 
stated by Goethe himself, and need only note with regard to 
these mmor writers that by contributing to Horen, and con- 
stantly supplying Goethe with material through private cor- 
respondence, they helped to animate the movement which 
during these years was communicating itself to the future 
leaders of philosophy. 

Goethe's 3* ^he g enera -l results of this active epoch were 
Analysis of the summarised by Goethe in the dialogue, "The 
Excellent m Art. c 0 u ector anc [ \^ xs p r i e nds " 1 (1798), which exhibits 

his ideas in a form as nearly systematic as any that he cared 
to give them, and is the first attempt in the history of aesthetic 
to represent 2 the excellent in art as a concrete into which there 
enter many degrees and phases of expressiveness. 

Hirt makes a mistake, Goethe writes 3 to Schiller in 1797, 
by not recognising that it would take his explanation as well 
as Winckelmann's and Lessing's, and many others, to define 
Art. But, so far, he is quite right, Goethe continues, in 
insisting on the characteristic and pathetic even in formative 
art. " The Collector and his Friends " is practically a dramati- 
sation of the view taken in that letter, and consequently forms 
a discussion of opinions which I presume to be those of Hirt's 
paper m Horen* and turns on a specific and a general ques- 
tion. The specific question arises out of Hirt's assertion that 
even in Greek art the characteristic is the dominant principle, 

fl " Der Sammler u. die Sevrigen" IV., 24. 235. 

2 For Winckelmann hardly intends to attempt this, though he makes con- 
tribution to such a view. 

3 Br., IV., 3. 152. 

4 See p. 194 above on Hirt's later work. 



BEAUTY AND CHARACTER. 3 I 3 



and that no extreme of pain or horror is avoided in it ; and 
refers to the conciliation of this account, which is not abso- 
lutely denied, with the views of Winckelmann and Lessing. 
The " character," it is urged on behalf of the Niobe group, 
appears "only in the most general lines which permeate the 
work like a spiritual skeleton." This metaphor of the skeleton 
or framework as the correlative of the characteristic is often in 
Goethe's mind, and points to an intolerable dualism between 
the characteristic and the beautiful. But it is not his only 
view. The general question dealt with in the treatise, start- 
ing from the relation of character and beauty, refers to the 
total synthesis of qualities demanded by the excellence of art. 
" Let an artist have wrought a bronze eagle which fully ex- 
presses the generic conception of the eagle (this is Hirt's 
narrow idea of the characteristic), and let him now desire to 
place it on the sceptre of a Zeus. Will it be suitable ? No, it 
must have in addition what the artist imparted to the Zeus to 
make him a god. — I see, interrupts the " Characteristiker " 
(supposed, with reason, to represent Hirt) ; you are referring 
to the grand style of Greek art ; but I only value it in as far 
as it is characteristic/' In the remarkable passage which 
follows, Greek art is not, as the common view of Goethe 
would lead us to expect, treated as the highest possible. "It 
satisfies," he says, "a high demand; but not the highest." 
" The generic conception leaves us cold [this is the ordinary 
attitude towards Hirt's "characteristic," which shows how 
remote it was understood to be from the individual character- 
isation which we identify with romance and naturalism], the 
ideal [of the Greek grand style] raises us above ourselves ; 
but we want more ; we want to return to a full enjoyment of 
the individual, without letting go either the significant or the 
sublime. This enigma can be solved only by beauty ; it gives 
life and warmth to the scientific [still thought of as distinguish- 
ing the ' characteristic '] ; and softens the significant and lofty ; 
so that a beautiful work of art has gone through the whole cycle, 
and is again a sort of individual, which we are able to make 
our own." 

Thus the characteristic and the ideal become individual 
through the fusing power of beauty. Goethe is here, as 
almost always, wavering between the conception of beauty as 
abstraction or omission, which at the bidding of some principle 
not clearly understood, softens or, too probably, enfeebles 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



the harsh outlines of definite individuality, and a conception 
of it as depending on the insight which discovers in the 
strongest details of individual portraiture a forcible grace of 
their own. Goethe never wholly threw off the dualism implied 
in the former view. 

At the close of the dialogue, those qualities of artists 
and art-judges, i.e. of aesthetic percipients, which have been 
noticed in the course of discussion, are finally reviewed one 
by one as essential elements in the excellence of art, and are 
then thrown into a tabular form, constructed so as to present 
an elaborate analysis of beauty in this its wider sense. 1 

In this scheme, each of three essential elements in the 
excellence of art — Art-truth, Beauty, and Finish, — is pre- 
sented as the synthesis of two opposite qualities or tendencies, 
one of which is "serious," and the other "playful," while 
both are mere onesided mannerism as contrasted with their 
synthesis which alone can be called style. Thus Art-truth is 
the union of the purely imitative and the fanciful tendency, 
Beauty of the characteristic and the inclination to mere 
decorative curvilinear form (after Hogarth's theory), and 
Finish of "minute accuracy " and "expressive sketchiness." 
And further, Art-truth, Beauty, and Finish, must themselves 
be united in order to make up the excellence of art. 

Here, it will be observed, we do not escape from the 
dualism involved in the appearance of beauty as contributory 
to that peculiar excellence of fine art, which must be set down 
as coincident with the beautiful in the widest sense. But yet 
the spell of a beauty that is devoid of content or defies 
analysis is now broken for ever. For the beauty constituted 



with a translation in brackets. 



1 I transcribe the table 

Ernst allein 
(Serious only). 

Individuelle Neigung 
(Individual tendency). 

Manier 
(Mannerism). 
Nachahmer 
(Copyists). 
Characteristiker 
(Artists who seize the essen- 
tial characters). 
Kleinkunstler 
(Minute pedants). 



Ernst und Spiel verbunden 
(Serious and playful com- 
bined). 

Ausbildung in's Allgemeine 
(Formation of a quality 

having general value). 
Styl 
(Style). 

Kunstwahrheit 
(Artistic truth). 
Schonheit 
(Beauty). 

Vollendung 

(Finish, completion). 



Spiel allein 
(Playful only). 

Individuelle Neigung 
(Individual tendency). 

Manier 
(Mannerism*). 
Phantomisten 
(Capricious fancy). 
Undulisten 

(Decorative grace ; curva- 
ture). 

Skizzisten 

(Expression without com- 
pletion. — Impressionist ?) 



ANALYSIS OF BEAUTY AS CONCRETE. 3 I 5 

by Goethe's synthesis is not a limit that enfeebles expression, 
but the combination of two kinds of expressiveness, that is, 
of characterisation by essential attributes, and formal or 
decorative symbolism. 

From such a construction of the idea of beauty it is only 
a step to regarding the other syntheses as subordinate to it 
no less than the factors of its own synthesis. In a theory of 
expression, taking account of its successive gradations, the 
general decorative principles or "curves of beauty," would 
rank lowest and condition all else; the "capricious fancy" devoid 
of substance and significance, would be considered as a mere 
failure to seize the import of things, and as possessing less 
content than the conscientious " copying " of nature, in which 
" pedantic minuteness " would be an aspect or element. And 
at a higher stage, as the first achievement of the penetrative 
imagination, the "impressionist sketch" would be considered 
to herald and precede the full grasp of "characteristic " reality 
in all its detail and with all its import. By some such 
modified presentation, which would not involve any consider- 
able change of principle, we should obtain an anticipation in 
all essentials of the most recent analyses which deal with beauty 
according to its grades of symbolic or expressive power. 
The unimportant position assigned by Goethe to capricious 
fancy is especially noteworthy, as a criticism on the constantly 
recurring fallacies which confuse the imaginative with the 
fictitious. 

The restriction of this dialogue to the arts of sculpture and 
painting enhances its value, because it was precisely in these 
arts that the principles of Lessing and Winckelmann, to which 
Goethe's letter referred, had their strongest hold, and if " the 
characteristic and pathetic" could be vindicated in this region, 
their recognition in the other arts would follow a fortiori. 
From this time forward beauty was necessarily considered in 
respect of its content, and formalistic theory, the acceptance 
of data of aesthetic enjoyment as ultimate, was, strictly speak- 
ing, an anachronism. Even the study of Winckelmann 
(1805) which Goethe began to prepare soon 1 after writing 
this dialogue, was mainly directed 2 to insisting on the organic 
evolution of art as an epoch-making discovery. 



2 See p. 242 above. 



3i6 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



4. It was through the life-work of Goethe and 

Conclusion. o 1 -n 1 1 • r • 1 1 

bchiller, and their many mends and contemporaries 
— through the development of the Kantian aesthetic judg- 
ment, limited by abstraction and subjectivity, into an objective 
concrete content which grows with the life and mind of man, 
that the data of modern aesthetic were finally prepared for 
incorporation in the answer to its problem. Their revival 
of the German theatre, as a form of art, gave the world little 
of permanent value beyond the two parts of Faust ; but their 
reflective synthesis of the Greek and the Briton, 1 by which 
they continued the work of Lessing, typifies the revolution 
which I have attempted to trace in the principal spheres of 
aesthetic appreciation. If no new art crowned this revolution 
— for music was not directly affected by it — yet a new philo- 
sophy did ; and it was amid the fermentation of this last ten 
years, whose tendencies I have been attempting to sketch, 
that the first great organic thinkers of the nineteenth century 
gathered the convictions of their early manhood. 



1 Schiller's verses on the representation of Voltaire's Mahomet at Weimar. 
See p. 238 supra. 



CHAPTER XII. 



OBJECTIVE IDEALISM. SCHELLING AND HEGEL. 

I. " Science attained its absolute standpoint in 
Schelling's philosophy, and although art had pre- 
viously begun to assert its peculiar nature and dignity in rela- 
tion to the highest interests of humanity, yet it was now that 
the actual notion of art and its place in scientific theory were 
discovered." 1 

In Hegel's opinion, expressed in this passage, the true line 
of philosophical succession ran from Schiller to Schelling. 
Hegel himself was born in 1770, Schelling in 1775 ; but the 
younger of the two friends for some time took the lead, and 
was a professor lecturing to crowded audiences before Hegel's 
name began to be known. From Hegel's correspondence 
with Schelling in 1795 we can see something of the intellectual 
excitement which the two friends shared under the influence 
of Kant, Fichte, and Schiller, whose /Esthetic letters in Horen 
for that year Hegel mentions as a masterpiece that had 
greatly delighted him. 2 Taken in connection with these early 
letters, and with his own first essays in philosophy 3 wholly 
on the lines of Fichte, Schelling's important works of 1800 
and 1802-3, the System of the Transcendental Idealism and 
the Philosophy of Art? show conclusively how his mind was 
carried forward under Schiller's influence. For Schelling 
continually refers to Schiller and Winckelmann, who furnished 
him with the objective material by which he enlarged into a 
historical and metaphysical theory the Kantian ideas respect- 
ing art as related to nature and to genius, which form at this 
time the framework of his thought. The term " absolute," 



1 Hegel's sEsth., i. ; E. Tr., p. 120, and see ch. xi. above, p. 286. 

2 H.'s Brief 1. 16. 

3 1794-5, e.g. Vom Ich ah Princip d. Philosophie. 

4 The Philosophy of Art was delivered in lectures, but was not published 
till after Schelling's death. Parts of it appeared in other lectures about 1802. 
See preface to vol. v. of the Werke. 

317 



3i8 



HISTORY OF AESTHETIC. 



and the idea of construing the objective unity, to which Kant 
pointed, and which Schiller helped to substantiate, in terms 
of an Ego, a principle somehow analogous with the "self" 
as shown in will and knowledge, were drawn from Fichte. 
Hegel, in one of the letters already alluded to, referring to 
Schelling's earliest Fichtean tract, writes to him as follows, 
" From Kant's system and its ultimate completion I expect a 
revolution in Germany, which will start from principles al- 
ready present and only needing to be worked out in general 
bearings, and applied to all existing knowledge. But there 
will always be a kind of esoteric philosophy, and the idea of 
God as the absolute Ego will belong to it." 1 This is a fore- 
boding of the identification which constitutes the stumbling- 
block and the attraction of objective idealism, the identification 
of the Deity with an immanent unity of things, not possessing 
separate existence or personal self-consciousness. For Fichte 
this absolute unity was a phrase only ; its substance was to 
be given by his successors. Schelling, in attempting this 
adventure, assigns to art and beauty as an objective synthesis 
a position in the scheme of reality even higher than that 
which subsequent theory concedes to them. 

We shall sufficiently understand Schelling's place in the 
general history of aesthetic if we briefly consider — 

i. The objectivity which he ascribes to art and beauty in 
its connection with his absolute standpoint. 

ii. The dynamical and historical treatment of the antithesis 
between ancient and modern life and art. 

iii. His contributions to the estimate and classification of 
the particular arts. 

I purposely spoke of Schelling's place in the " general " 
history of aesthetic. His criticisms and appreciations of indi- 
vidual works of art, and of particular periods and tendencies, 
are of too great mass to be at all thoroughly treated here. It 
is hard to say how much Hegel owes to him, or how far they 
are both drawing from common sources among the data of 
aesthetic. The great treatise on the Philosophy of Art was 
not published before Hegel's death, but he may have heard it 
and would certainly hear about it, or meet with it in MS., 
when delivered as lectures in 1802 and after. And many of 
its ideas were made known in published papers and addresses. 



1 Br., 1. 15 (1795)- 



BEAUTY DEFINED. 



3*9 



There is very little in Hegel's sEstketic which might not 
have been suggested, in however bizarre or negative a mode, 
by observation and theories that are to be found in Schelling. 
objectivity of i- If we bear in mind the essential ideas of 
Art and Beauty. Kant and Schiller, a few quotations from Schell- 
ing' s System of Transcendental Idealism (1800) will show us 
how he took up their suggestions into an audacious theory. 

" The whole system," he writes in the conclusion of this 
work, " falls between two extremes, of which one is denoted by 
the intellectual intuition, which Kant aims at, the other by the 
aesthetic intuition, the substance of Schiller's system. What 
the intellectual intuition is for the philosopher, the aesthetic 
intuition is for his object. The former as merely necessary 
to the philosopher's peculiar tendency of mind, does not occur 
in the ordinary consciousness as such ; the latter, which is 
nothing but the intellectual intuition made universal or objec- 
tive, at least may occur in every consciousness. From this 
it may be seen that and why philosophy as philosophy can 
never have universal validity. 1 The one thing to which abso- 
lute objectivity is given, is Art. Take away, it may be said, 
the objectivity of art, and it ceases to be what it is, and be- 
comes philosophy ; give philosophy objectivity, and. it ceases 
to be philosophy, and becomes Art. Philosophy, attains the 
highest, but it brings to that point, so to speak, only a fraction 
of the man. Art brings the whole man as he is to the cog- 
nition of the highest, and this is the eternal distinction and 
the marvel of art." 2 

" Every aesthetic production starts from an essentially in- 
finite separation of the two activities [the conscious one of 
freedom, and the unconscious one of nature — drawn from 
Kant's treatment of Art in relation to Genius] which are 
separated in all free productions. But as these two activities 
are to be represented in the product as in union, this product 
represents an infinite in finite form. Now the infinite repre- 
sented in finite form is Beauty. The fundamental character 
of every work of art, which comprehends in it the two former 
characters [infinite meaning and infinite reconciliation or satis- 



1 Plainly a reminiscence of Schiller's Azsth. Br., 27 near the end on art 
as addressing the whole man. The superiority here assigned to art over 
philosophy is the distinctive point in which Hegel and Schelling differ. 
Cf. ^Esth., Br., 15, and p. 295 sup. 

2 Werke, 3. 630. 



320 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



faction — taken as = repose, a reference to Winckelmann] is 
therefore Beauty, and without beauty there is no work of 
art." 1 The subsequent passage, which Schasler 2 professes 
himself unable to understand, is a simple explanation, follow- 
ing Kant, of the sublime as a more purely subjective recon- 
ciliation than that embodied in beauty, depending on an effort 
of mind less directly prescribed by the object of perception 3 
than is the case with the beautiful par excellence. 

" The product of art," he says in another place, " is dis- 
tinguished from the organic product chiefly in this, (a) that 
the organic being represents previous to separation what 
aesthetic production represents subsequently to separation but 
reunited ; (b) that organic production does not issue from con- 
sciousness, and therefore not from the infinite contradiction 4 
which is the condition of aesthetic production. The organic 
product of nature is therefore not necessarily beautiful." 5 — 
The last clause states a point of view distinctive of the 
time, which we are now tending to abandon. " But this un- 
known, which in this case (in art) brings into unexpected har- 
mony the objective 6 and the conscious 6 activity, is nothing 
other than that Absolute [Schelling's footnote calls it " Das 
Urselbst," the fundamental self or unconscious but immanent 
principle of the world ; the absolute ego of Hegel's letter 
above] which contains the universal ground of the pre-estab- 
lished harmony between the conscious and the unconscious." 7 
He then connects the operation of the unconscious in art- 
production with Kant's doctrine of genius. The absolute has 
no existence apart from its expressions. 

The place of art in Schelling's philosophy is sufficiently 



1 W., 3. 620-1. 

2 G. d. A., 2. 834. 

3 Kant, K. d. [/., p. too. 

4 This recurring phrase " infinite contradiction " and " infinite reconcilia- 
tion " or solution may be best understood by thinking of an attempt to bring 
disparate ideas and processes into terms of each other. The failure to do 
this is the "infinite contradiction," as e.g. moral action never quite satisfies 
the moral will. The " infinite reconciliation " is the discovery of an idea or 
process or product in which the disparates cease to diverge and are both of 
them "satisfied." 

5 W, 3. 621. 

6 Kant's " Nature " and " Freedom," as before. This passage shows with 
striking clearness how his postulate of an underlying unity was developed by 
Schelling. 

7 W.j 3. 615. 



\ 

THE ABSOLUTE STANDPOINT. 



321 



indicated by these quotations, but one more may be added 
which sums up the whole matter in the most striking way. 

"The system of knowledge is to be regarded as complete 
when it returns to its first principle, Transcendental Philo- 
sophy, therefore, is only complete when it. can show the 
identity (viz. the principle that the same activity which is 
productive in action with consciousness, is productive in the 
world without consciousness) — the highest solution of its 
whole problem, in its principle (the Ego). 

It is therefore postulated that this activity, conscious and 
unconscious at once, shall be shown in the subjective, in con- 
sciousness itself. Such an activity is the aesthetic activity 
alone, and every work of art can only be understood as the 
product of such a one. The ideal world of art and the real 
one of objects are therefore products of one and the same 
activity ; the coincidence of the two (the conscious and the 
unconscious) without .consciousness 1 gives the real world, 
with consciousness the aesthetic world. 

The objective world is only the primitive and "still uncon- 
scious poetry of mind ; the universal organon of philosophy, 
and the keystone of its entire arch, is the philosophy of 
art." 2 

We have here before us in the plainest language both the 
" absolute standpoint " in philosophy and the new conception 
of art, to which Hegel points in his account of Schelling. 
His close relation to Kant and Schiller is evinced by every 
line of the passages from which my quotations are taken. We 
hear nothing as yet of the supra-sensuous and theosophic 
world of beauty, into which pseudo-Platonic abstractions 
Schelling fell in later years. We have nothing but the 
answer, in terms of Fichte and Schiller, to the Kantian 
demand for an underlying unity between nature and freedom. 
More especially we are to observe that the Absolute does not 
exist in the form of consciousness, except in the human race, 
and that the ideas or archetypes 3 are the particular forms 
in which it is revealed to aesthetic perception. Often we 



1 Coincidence of the conscious and unconscious activity withour conscious- 
ness seems to mean that organic beings which end by being conscious, are 
built up causally without the operation of consciousness. In art, he says, the 
reverse is the case ; an unconscious product is consciously built up. 

2 w -, 3- 349- 

3 Urbilder. 



322 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



might think that we are reading Schopenhauer. 1 The 
''Absolute" standpoint is what we more popularly call the 
modern standpoint. It negatives the idea of irrational con- 
ditions in causation— for rational conditions are merely the 
definite attributes of a systematic universe — of idle reserva- 
tions in knowledge, or dualistic separation between the orders 
of things. It rests on the conviction of human freedom, not 
as alien to nature, but as rooted in the system to which nature 
belongs ; not as supernatural therefore, but as natural. If 
Nature and Freedom are hostile or disconnected, the one is 
conditioned by the other. If they are expressions of the same 
principle, then their apparent contradictions are modes of co- 
operation, and each, as expressing the absolute whole which 
includes all conditions {not, which is abstract, undefined, and 
devoid of conditions) is itself absolute, or free from any in- 
terference other than that ultimately rooted in its own nature. 

The free faith, courage, and enterprise, implied in such a 
standpoint are, historically speaking, characteristic of the 
modern spirit, and reach the extreme of audacity in many 
thinkers to whose views the philosophy of the Absolute, as 
they understand it, is in diametrical antagonism. But what- 
ever may have been its follies and its extravagances, no mis- 
understanding is possible of the main tendency of objective 
Idealism, as we have watched it developing from Kant's tenta- 
tive solution of the antithesis of the age. It simply consists 
in the vindication of concrete unity or rational system as the 
nature of the world in which we live. Inner and outer, 2 
natural and supernatural, spiritual and material, are hence- 
forward terms that have lost their meaning, except in refer- 
ence to the higher and lower purposes of man. And the 
principal instrument in this revolution has been the growing 
belief in the objectivity of the aesthetic judgment, as a union 
of sense and reason. 

. ii. It has been said that the fundamental differ- 

Histoncal Treat- . ... i i • 

mentof "Ancient e nee between ancient and modern philosophy lies 
and Modem. j n ^ e f act t ] lat t: jj e one came before the other. 



1 E.g. W., 3. 371. "Music is the archetypal rhythm of Nature and the 
Universe, which by means of this art breaks through into the world of second- 
ary existence " (der abgebildeten Welt). 

2 Cf. Goethe's lines, " Ins Innere der Natur," especially the end, — 

" Vor allem doch zu priifen ist 
Ob Kern du oder Schale bist." 



" INFINITE " FORM. 



323 



The same is true of the general contrast between the antique 
and the modern. Thus the modern is never simple ; it is 
always, so to speak, on the top of something else ; always 
charged with a contradiction, with a reminiscence, in one 
word, with a history. 

Schiller's analysis of the reflective spirit in the sphere of 
poetry 1 had done something to focus the growing sense of 
this peculiarity in a distinct conception of development. For 
Schelling, with his pronounced idea of an underlying unity, 
such a conception became a central problem of philosophy ; 
and with Schiller constantly before his mind, he persistently 
refers a whole nest of antitheses concerning the " ancient and 
modern " to a principle which he endeavours to expound in a 
highly abstract form. 

In this abstract form the principle in question turns on the 
opposition between " Finite " and " Infinite." The demand, it 
is said, which was fulfilled by Greek mythology, was directed 
to the representation of the Infinite within the Finite, while 
that involved in Christianity is rather to subordinate the 
Finite to the Infinite. 2 Obviously, in giving a meaning to 
these highly formal antitheses, the application of which is in 
one writing actually reversed, 3 the whole question is, which are 
to be taken as the defining terms. And there is no doubt 
that however the expressions are arranged, the defining term 
is Finite for ancient mythology, and Infinite for Christianity. 
The intended contrast may be fairly paraphrased thus : that 
in the ancient world the intellectual or ideal import of objects 
or mythological persons was measured by the carrying capa- 
city, so to speak, that is, by the power of adequate represen- 
tation, inherent in such objects or persons as given to fancy 
or perception. The god, for example, meant no more than 
could fairly be taken as exhibited in the form attributed to 
him. The symbolism of spiritual things in sensuous forms 
was therefore adequate, but only by sacrificing range and 
depth in the spiritual things themselves. In the modern or 
Christian world, on the other hand, the intellectual or spirit- 
ual import is dominant, and refuses to be measured by the 
carrying capacity of any object or person presented to fancy 

1 Principally in the tract on Naive and Sentimental Poetry which Schelling 
quotes largely in the " Philosophy of Art." 

2 5. 430 (" The Philosophy of Art ")• 

3 W., 5., Preface. 



3 2 4 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



or perception. The Christ, for example, or the Virgin Mary, 
suggests an inexhaustible wealth of spiritual ideas. Instead 
of an adequate symbolism there is, therefore, only an inade- 
quate or suggestive symbolism, in other words, an allegory. 
This recurrent formula of finite and infinite, wherever it is 
used in Schelling with reference to the imaginative basis of 
art, seems to mean that in the one case the infinite (ideal), is 
narrowed down to the finite (sensuous), and in the other the 
finite (sensuous) is racked and stretched and brought to an 
expressiveness more like that of feeling and thought, to admit 
the import of the infinite (ideal). It is indeed painful to us, 
and we hold it false, when we are told that modern art is 
essentially allegory, which is the conclusion that Schelling 
draws from the entire subordination of symbol to import in the 
modern imagination. But we must recall what was said in 
the earlier chapters of this work respecting the power exerted 
by a profound import in exhausting the significance of the 
sensuous object on which it is imposed. In fact, art which 
is in this strict technical sense allegorical, by suggesting more 
than it can adequately convey, is not mechanical, arbitrary or 
conventional, which are the faults of common allegory, but 
is likely to strain every resource of natural expressiveness to 
the furthest limit, although, when all is done, more remains 
behind in the shape of mere suggestion. 

In a lecture of the year 1802 (published 1803) " On the 
historical construction of Christianity" 1 the same antithesis 
is stated in another form. Christianity is here contrasted with 
the Greek religion as the historical with the natural view of 
the universe. The conception is ultimately the same as that 
just examined. The modern man, it is maintained, has been 
taught to regard the universe as a moral kingdom, 2 a world 
of change and movement in which a power and unity is re- 
vealed, greater and more durable than any isolated manifesta- 
tion of it. The divine itself is made known to him not as a 
permanent figure, but as a vanishing historical personage, 
whose abiding with the world is not sensuous but ideal. For 
the Greek, the gods were permanent objective parts of nature, 
and the world was a fixed system without essential movement 
or progression. Those who are familiar with the politico-ethical 



1 IV., 5. 286 ff. 

2 All this seems suggested by Kant's Religion innerhalb der Grenzen d. R. V. 



THE IMPORTANCE OF HISTORY. 



325 



standpoint of Plato and Aristotle will feel the profound justice 
of these ideas. 1 The notion of a world-evolution was wholly 
alien to the Greeks. We on the contrary, it is urged by 
Schelling, are in our whole life founded on history. And 
history belongs to the world of mind, not to the world of 
nature. The entire medium and texture of modern life is thus 
ideal in the sense that it is charged with traditions, and prin- 
ciples, and conceptions of a moral or providential order, inter- 
woven in human history, in which we recognise that man has 
his being. Obviously this contrast has only a relative truth. 
We deny to the Greek a historical consciousness because his 
historical consciousness is lost to us. Yet after all it remains 
true that he lived by sight and we live by faith. The mere 
fact that his life lies at the root of ours is enough to produce 
this result. The medium of our life is succession, that of his 
life was coexistence. And succession can be a medium of life 
only through ideas. For the Christian, history is the symbol of 
God. 2 The effect of such a conception on the theory of art is 
to exhibit modern beauty as charged with a burden of ideal 
meaning which is hostile to the simpler forms of sensuous ex- 
pression, and taxes to the utmost the capacities of the most 
varied and flexible media. 

And more strictly within the field of art we find the same 
principle applied by Schelling in the remarkable paper " On 
Dante in a philosophical aspect." 3 This paper was the basis 
of my treatment of Dante in ch. vii., and it is now only 
necessary to point its reference to Schelling's view of modern 
art. The contrast of finite and infinite or of nature and 
history becomes, in its application to the particular work of art, 
the contrast of genus and individual, The " subjectivity " 
forced upon the modern mind by its reflective and historical 
basis asserts itself in art as individuality, whereas in the 
Greek world expression was abstract, " exemplary " or 
typical, and the utterance rather of the racial than of the 
individual genius. This conception is no doubt suggested or 
reinforced by Wolfs treatment of the Homeric poems as a 
racial rather than an individual achievement. 

The law of modern poetry, till the great modern epic shall 



1 See Newman's Ifitroduction to Ar. Politics, conclusion. 

2 Cf. the Erdgeist's song in Faust. 

3 1802-3, IK, 5. 152. 



326 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



be written, 1 is, Schelling writes, 2 in the paper on Dante, " that 
the individual shall form into a whole that portion of the world 
which is revealed to him, and shall create his mythology for 
himself out of the material of his time, its history and its 
science. For as the ancient world was universally the world 
of genera, so is the modern world that of individuals ; in the 
former the universal is really the particular, the race acts 
as an individual (Wolf s theory of the Epos) ; in the latter, 
on the contrary, the starting point is the particular, which 
necessarily becomes universal. In the former, for this very 
reason, everything is permanent, imperishable ; number has, 
so to speak, no power, as the universal idea coincides with 
that of the individual ; in the latter, change and movement 
are the abiding law ; no closed circle, but only one extensible 
to infinity by means of individuality can contain its principles. 
And because universality belongs to the essence of poetry, 
it is a necessary requirement that through the height of 
peculiarity the individual should again become of universal 
import, and through the completeness of particularity should 
again become absolute. It is through this character of abso- 
lute individuality, of utter incomparability with everything 
else, which his poem possesses, that Dante is the creator of 
modern art, which cannot be conceived apart from this arbi- 
trary necessity and necessary arbitrariness." 

The individual, it will be observed, has in the modern world 
to create his own mythology. The belief expressed elsewhere 3 
that " Natur-philosophie " is the first adumbration of the future 
world-mythology, may be taken as an anticipation of the 
Modern Painters, in as far as the essence of the latter work 
is to disclose the rational and symbolic content of natural 
phenomena. In affirming, therefore, that mythology is neces- 
sary to Art, Schelling is only demanding a certain range of 
fancy, organised in terms relevant to the expressive powers of 
particular arts, and possessed of a certain universal recognition 
or validity. Shakespeare, for example, he regards as having 
created his own mythology. 4 Mythology which is used, as 



1 I.e. a poem that shall summarise the modern world and be its single work, 
as Homer was that of the early Greek world. The idea that we are now in 
the " rhapsode " stage, the stage of utterance which will one day make up a 
whole, is plainly a bizarre application of Wolfs ideas. 

2 IV., 5. 154. 3 lb., 443-5 (" Philosophy of Art "). 4 lb., 445. 



MODERN BEAUTY. 



3 2 7 



the antique mythology in modern poetry, he sets down as 
sheer frigid formalism. 1 

The qualities of modern sentiment and imagination, which 
all these antitheses are intended to embody, stand in essential 
relation to the comparative importance and elaboration of 
different species of art in ancient and in modern times. The 
sensuous vehicles of artistic expression have different capa- 
cities and are appropriate to different modes of feeling and 
utterance. Therefore the classification of the several arts is 
in immediate dependence on the view adopted as to the line 
of progress which is to be ascribed to aesthetic imagination 
and sensibility. It is very remarkable that Schilling's general 
definition of beauty 2 coincides with the formula which he 
applies to ancient imagination in contrast with modern — " the 
presentation of the infinite within the finite." It is clear, from 
what has been said, that this formula must be interpreted so 
as to include both sides of the antithesis, with one side of 
which it is at first sight identical. Modern beauty is still the 
presentation of the infinite in the finite, but in it the finite, as I 
endeavoured to explain, is both degraded into an inadequate 
symbol, and is also racked and burdened to the uttermost, so 
that it may take on something of the character of the infinite 
which it has to express. It agrees with the whole course of 
our inquiry to find that, in a natural and unsophisticated sense, 
antique beauty and beauty proper coincide, while in order to 
bring modern beauty under the head of beauty proper the 
defining term needs a good deal of interpretation. 
THe Particular hi. In the discourse " on the relation of For- 
Arts - mative Art to Nature," 3 Schelling brings together 
the conception of the imitation of nature in a new and pro- 
found sense with the conception of characteristic beauty. 
Having liberated the latter from the contradiction which 
Goethe suffered to remain in it, he applies the joint result to 
the distinction between sculpture as the peculiarly antique, 
and painting as the peculiarly modern art. 

The fault of the old view that art aims at the imitation of 
nature, which gave no explanation how the beautiful which 
was to be imitated differed from the ugly which was not, lay, 
as he points out, in regarding Nature as a lifeless aggregate of 
objects. The moment that Nature is recognised as a living 



1 IK, 5. 443. 3 See above, p. 319. 3 JV., 7. 287 (1807). 



328 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



whole, the expression of reasonable powers, the rule of " imi- 
tation," and the aim of "idealisation" becomes clear. "We 
must transcend the given form in order to restore it as in- 
telligible, vital, and genuinely felt." 1 Even Winckelmann, 
who had a true feeling for nature, did not, so Schelling con- 
tinues, explain that form is beautiful purely because and in as 
far as it reveals the idea. The common demand 2 for " ideali- 
sation " implies that beauty is negatively related to reality. 
But this is not the case ; on the contrary, the value of true 
idealisation is to reveal the vital and essential in nature. Thus 
the negative notion of the ideal, or of characterisation as op- 
posed to the ideal, is defective. Form is not a limit imposed 
ab extra on body ; it is spontaneous and positive, the expres- 
sion of a creative force. "When the artist seizes the look 
and essence of the idea which works in the individual, and 
makes it emphatic, he forms the individual into a self-existent 
world, a genus, an eternal type." 3 " Nature is characteristic 
from its first beginnings," up to the human form ; and the 
characteristic persists throughout as the operative foundation 
of the beautiful. 4 

Goethe's comparison 5 of the characteristic in art to the skele- 
ton of a body is here admirably criticised and supplemented. 
The skeleton is not separable from, or prior to, or more real 
than the soft expressive parts which it supports. The true 
characteristic corresponds to the expression of the whole 
figure, flesh and bones, active and passive. The framework 
can never be justly contrasted with the completed form and 
its beauty. 

Here, then, in the full task laid upon the artist we have 
the point of the difference between sculpture and painting. 
Sculpture, the essentially ancient art, cannot cope with the 
"characteristic variety" of nature; it does not represent space, 
but has its space in it [is in real space] and is therefore obliged 
to reduce its world almost to a point. Thus it can only repre- 
sent such beauty as remains beautiful when treated as a single 
and simple whole. The painter, who belongs distinctly to 
the modern world, has all creation before him, and can use 
all grades of the characteristic and apparently less beautiful 
as contributory to the wider totality of his work. It must be 



1 W., 7. 299. 
4 lb., 307. 



2 lb., 302. 3 lb., 304. 

5 In Der Samm/er it. die S. 



SCULPTURE AND PAINTING. 



3 2 9 



inconsistency which pursues 
stantly tempted to treat the 5 
as the highest and truest, fol 
same time he breaks down. 
The distinction between : 



natural 



ZTd. 11.11 1 ~ v.\i: Z7. cSl 



ire and painting is further 
rue feeling of their relation, 
>ears traces of superstition, 
ans of bodily things; paint- 
Su:h ohr^s-rs 5_i 5 ~ 5 'ts: bu: 
ace of expressive capacity 
Form colour, and pigments 
iclusion, however, is just ; 
ttered bv its material and 



330 



HISTORY OF AESTHETIC. 



recognise that he is on the downgrade of sentimentalism, 
and that the superstitions of his later life are casting their 
shadows before. 

Schelling's systematic classification of the arts is of value 
rather as the first thorough-going attempt at such a classifica- 
tion, and as giving occasion, by the way, for a good deal of 
analysis of their respective powers and peculiarities, than for 
any permanent importance in the leading distinction on which 
it is based. It plainly follows Kant's division, to which, it will 
be remembered, Kant himself attached but little importance, 
into arts of speech and of form, adding to the latter category 
the art of music, which Kant placed apart under the head 
of the beautiful play of sensations. 

But Schelling connects this main division of the arts with 
the same abstract principle which represents to him the differ- 
ence between the modern and the antique. The arts of the 
Real series are embodiments of the Infinite in the Finite — the 
principle, as we saw, 1 of beauty in general, and more especially 
of antique beauty, Those of the Ideal series are cases of the 
subordination of the Finite to the Infinite. 2 It is here more 
plain than ever that the terms of the two antitheses do not 
occupy strictly contrasted places. In both of them the In- 
finite, that is, ideas, is the matter represented, and the 
relatively Finite, the form, is in both the medium of repre- 
sentation. But in the one the Finite retains its sensuous or 
material limitations to the full, in the other it is tyrannised 
over by the meaning and assumes in some degree an infinite 
or ideal character. Language is a case of this principle. The 
word loses its individual material being — its look, shape and 
sound 3 become a matter of indifference — and we go straight 
to the idea which it suggests. The two antitheses would 
express their intention more intelligibly if they spoke of 
Representation of the Infinite in Finite form, and Representa- 
tion of the Infinite in Infinite form, it being understood that 
form can only be infinite relatively and through an extension 
of its natural functions. 

Now as the second formula, that of modern art and of the 
ideal series, falls outside the definition of beauty proper, which 



1 P. 327 supra. 

2 W., 5. 630. 

3 I do not admit that in art its sound is indifferent. 



SYSTEMATIC TREATMENT OF THE ARTS. 



33 1 



is one with the formula of ancient art and of the real series, 
we might have expected to find a view of historical succession 
underlying the distinction between the two series. Traces 
of such a view, but traces only, are to be found in the remark 1 
that the ancients were plastic in their poetry, while modern 
poetry is (as in Dante) far more arbitrary and capricious and 
all but impossible to reduce to typical species. We observed 
that the contrast between sculpture as typically antique and 
painting as typically modern was rightly drawn elsewhere. 

The other and very remarkable feature of the construction 
of these two series, is the involution of "powers," or phases 
within phases, by the repeated application of an identical 
formula to elements previously obtained by that same formula. 
This process prevails indeed throughout Schelling's philoso- 
phy. Thus in the realm of mind (itself an Ideal unity) Art and 
Philosophy were respectively unities in which the Real and the 
Ideal predominated ; in Art, again, the two series in question 
are unities of the Finite and Infinite, in each of which one of 
these principles prevails over the others. And, moreover, 
within each series there is a predominant real, a predominant 
ideal, and their "indifference" or equally-balanced unity. 
Thus in Poetry, whose forms constitute the ideal series, the 
relatively real is the Lyric, the ideal par excellence is the Epic, 
and the synthesis of the two is the Dramatic. In the real 
series the real par excellence is music, the relatively ideal is 
painting (I cannot think why), and the synthesis of the two is 
sculpture. Within sculpture again Architecture appears as a 
sub-form distinct from the bas-relief and from sculpture in the 
round, as real par excellence and corresponding to music — a 
frozen music, as Schelling calls it. 

I do not adduce all this as of any value in its substantive 
application as handled by Schelling, but for two historical 
reasons. In the first place, any thread of systematic con- 
nection, however quaint or unreal, which causes a complete 
and impartial survey to be made for the first time of the 
whole range of a subject, is of immense historical importance 
and stimulating effect. Schelling's elaborate discussion of 
music, for example, is a new thing in aesthetic theory ; and 
however much we may regret the parallel drawn between it 
and architecture, yet the conception of it as representing 2 pure 



1 TV-, 5- 632. 



2 lb., 5- 502. 



332 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



movement abstracted from objects, and the real form of things 
and events, has much in common with Schopenhauer and with 
later conceptions. 

But secondly, whether or no Hegel's dialectic may have 
originated in these ideas of Schelling, the triplicity in syn- 
thesis (suggested of course by Kant) and involution by re- 
application of identical formulae, are important principles in all 
philosophical construction, though readily lending themselves 
to a futile ingenuity. It is incontestably true that analogous 
phases repeat themselves, and repeat themselves cumulatively, 
in mind and nature. The world moves forward not merely 
from one condition to another, but as a whole of conditions, 
each of which reproduces itself according to its law of differen- 
tiation within the general phase which the whole has assumed 
according to this same law. 1 Thus the general idea that the 
entire system of the arts recurs on different planes and with a 
different centre, as the whole of life is pushed forward into 
special conformity with one type of expression, by the results 
of its own activity, is thoroughly just, and is a principle which 
might be the foundation of a synthesis between a linear 
classification of the arts and their history in time. Not the 
mere progression from art to art, but the movement of the 
characteristic centre of artistic utterance would be the point 
in which history would justify classification. 

Schelling's own serial arrangement is, however, merely a 
piece of arbitrary formalism. If we ask what it substantially 
means, there is no answer. In what sense are lyric, epic and 
dramatic poetry a second series corresponding to music, paint- 
ing and sculpture ? We are not told that the order of the 
series is an ascending order either in evolution or in power of 
presentation, and however we read them we cannot make it 
such. The logical framework of the arrangement seems not to 
correspond to any progression in the qualities of art as art, 
and we should give it the best effect by reading the real series 
backwards from sculpture to music, and the ideal forwards 
from lyric to dramatic poetry, which would destroy the correla- 
tion of the terms and therefore cannot be intended. Though 
a rough idea of progress from perception to fancy may have 



1 Thus we might say, in the Christian world there is the heathen Christian 
the Greek Christian, and the Christian Christian. 



schelling's achievement. 



333 



decided Schelling to do his best with Kant's suggestion, the 
double series really cuts the development in two ; the triplets 
of the separate syntheses are independent of each other, and 
their cross analogies are futile. Any pair of arts can be thus 
regarded as analogous, and there is hardly any pair that has 
not been so regarded. What just estimate of the value of the 
arts is formed by Schelling, as in the case of music, is in spite 
of the serial arrangement and not derived from it. Such 
parallel series have been the foundation of many subsequent 
classifications of the arts, even of that proposed by Schasler. 
But unless it is thoroughly explained why there are two 
series, and how the beginning of the one is related to the 
close of the other, and, if cross correspondences are alleged, 
why they are really essential to the notion of the arts sup- 
posed to correspond, I see no meaning in arrangements of 
this kind. The problem of classification is to illustrate the 
affinity between individuals either in origin or in function 
or in both. I cannot see that the superficial resemblance 
between sculpture and the drama, or between epic poetry 
(some prefer to say lyric) and painting, throws any light on 
any question of the kind. Hartmann's distinction, coincident 
with that of Schelling's series, between arts of perceptive 
semblance and arts of imaginative semblance, will be dis- 
cussed in its place. 

With Schelling we are fairly launched on nineteenth century 
aesthetic. The objectivity and necessary historical continuity 
of the sense of beauty as a supreme expression — Schelling 
will have it to be the supreme expression — of the absolute or 
divine reality as uttering itself through man, has become an 
axiom of philosophy. The negative notions of the beautiful 
and of the characteristic are shown to be imperfect, and their 
opposition to be unreal. The principle of progressive and 
cumulative synthesis, according to a law which is constantly 
re-applied to its own results, is exhibited, though incoherently 
and inconsistently, in a classification of the fine arts. 

All this was really achieved, but how far it entered into 
history by affecting his successors is a different question. The 
" Philosophy of Art " was given in lectures and circulated in 
MS., but probably had only a partial effect. I cannot say for 
certain whether it was known to Hegel. But the published 
lectures and papers and the System of Transcendental Idealism, 
contain all that is of importance, except the detailed treatment 



334 



HISTORY OF .ESTHETIC. 



of the arts, and there can be no doubt that Hegel, while 
largely drawing from common sources, was also, as is shown 
by the lectures on ^Esthetic, immensely influenced by Schell- 
ing's views of art and of aesthetic philosophy. 

The genius and character of the two men were extra- 
ordinarily different, and extraordinarily suitable the one to go 
before and the other to follow. Schellino- at his best has a 
profusion of thought and brilliancy of suggestion with which 
Hegel cannot compare. But soon the reader finds that he is 
an untrustworthy guide ; impatient, incoherent, credulous, with 
no sterling judgment of art, and with a constant bias to the 
sentimental and the superstitious. Hegel is persevering, 
laborious, consistent, remarkable for his healthy and masculine 
judgment of art, while sympathetic and even passionate below 
the surface. He detests rhetoric, to which Schelling was 
prone, and the reader feels that fail as he may, he is always 
making a genuine effort to grasp the essence and get to the 
heart of his subject. Considering the close early connection 
between the two great thinkers, and the immense range of 
recent material of which they shared the inheritance, it may be 
said that while we prefer Hegel to Schelling, this is partly 
because Schelling is best represented in Hegel. 

Heg;el II. i. Hegel's aesthetic system, as represented 

Dialectic in the with substantial fidelity in the lectures on aesthetic, 1 
makes no parade of the dialectic method which 
constitutes the essential difficulty of his other philosophical 
works. Questions as to the degree in which the Dialectic 
controls the construction of the Esthetic, must be argued not 
with reference to the structure of the latter, which is tolerably 
plain, but with reference to the nature of the former, which 
will never perhaps be thoroughly agreed upon. Therefore 
the Dialectic as such does not concern us here, and I propose 
to spare my readers almost all enquiry into it, only saying 
enough to explain my own conviction that in the aesthetic we 
possess a specimen of the reasonable connection which the 



1 This work on ^Esthetic was published in 1835, having been put into 
shape after Hegel's death out of materials consisting of Hegel's MSS. of the 
lectures, in which the introductions were for the most part fully written out, 
and of the notes taken by pupils, several sets of which were collected for the 
purpose. The work is substantively reliable, but must not be regarded as a 
literary production from Hegel's hand. 



THE DIALECTIC. 



335 



dialectic was intended to emphasise, without the constant 
parade of unfamiliar terms which have been thought to be 
mere lurking-places of fallacy. The evolution of beauty, as 
Hegel describes it, depends on a principle analogous to that 
which Schelling appealed to in a far more artificial form. In 
every process of change construed according to the postulate 
of causation, that which ceases to exist must be supposed so 
to cease because its nature is no longer adequate to the claim 
made upon it by the connected system within which it has its 
being. In a formal and technical sense, therefore, it may be 
contended that in every causal process, any element w r hich 
ceases to be, must necessarily be replaced by something more 
adequate than itself to the requirements of the process as a 
whole. But such a deduction would be purely formal, because 
it is possible that the elements of the causal connection might 
be of a limiting or destructive character, and the reason for 
the better adaptation of the succeeding element to these 
demands might lie in its possessing not a larger but a scantier 
content. To conditions which forbid life, a corpse is better 
adapted than a living man. But within any evolution which 
has in fact a progressive character the formal principle just 
indicated will have a real bearing. Any vanishing element, 
in being replaced by something which better harmonises with 
the systematic and causal process as a whole, is giving way 
before necessities which in part its own activity has modified 
into a form in which it can no longer meet them. Thus, for 
instance, physical decay is not the only reason why a man's 
life-work ends when he is old. Plato's successor must be not 
Plato but Aristotle, and granting that adaptability is a matter 
of degree, still, considering life as a system of phases which 
determine each other, it seems clear that Plato could not 
become Aristotle by a mere prolongation of his days. The 
succeeding factor, which meets the new necessities that mould 
it, is by the very condition of its existence carrying on the life- 
work of its predecessor in a more complex form, weighted 
alike with what it achieved, and with what it died in failing to 
achieve. If we are pleased to express these relations by say- 
ing that every positive existence, in a progressive evolution, 
passes over into its negation, which then necessarily makes 
w r ay for a further positive result, including both the earlier 
positive and its negative, the phraseology is technical but not 
I think altogether unintelligible. And if we are asked how a 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



bare negation can enter into the determination of any positive 
result, we might point to the possibility that Hegel may have 
been aware that within a concrete and causal process there is 
no such thing as a bare negation. However this may be, we 
have only to master the conception of a necessary progressive 
movement so far as will enable us to follow the structure of 
the ^Esthetic. For this purpose one more point is necessary 
to be noted. The successor inherits a task modified by his 
predecessor, but yet the same, in the sense of bearing the 
same relation to the causal system which surrounds them both. 
And therefore there is a certain truth in the quaint terminology 
of Schelling, which treats the successive phases of evolution 
in any particular direction as " powers," or specialised intensi- 
fications, produced by the reiterated application of an identical 
process to results generated by itself. 

I will now attempt a brief account of the most interesting 
features of Hegel's aesthetic system, relying on the abstract, in 
great part probably from his own hand, which is printed in the 
Appendix, for a complete conspectus of it, which would other- 
wise have occupied the whole of my space in the text as essen- 
tial to understanding the relation of the parts to each other. 
The conception n - Beauty is the Idea as it shows itself to 

of Beauty, sense. 1 The Idea, we must remember, does not 
imply consciousness, although both life and consciousness are 
reckoned among the forms of its manifestation. But the 
Idea as such is the concrete world-process considered as a 
systematic unity. As its "show" or " semblance " (Schein) 
the beautiful is at once distinguished from the true, 2 which is 
the Idea as it is for thought, and therefore has an identical 
substance with that of beauty but a different form. It is also, 
as by Kant, distinguished from the good, useful, and pleasant, 
all of which have to do with will or desire. 

As belonging neither to theory nor to Desire, the Beautiful 
is said to be "infinite," that is to say, free from relativity, 
whether according to the law of sufficient reason, or according 
to the alien purposes imposed by desire on its object. The 
infinite in this peculiar sense is the self-contained or the self- 
complete ; that which satisfies the perception and does not 
refer it away through a series of causes or purposes lying 
outside itself. If endless infinity may be compared to an 



1 sEsth.) i. 141. 



2 lb. 



ORGANIC DEVELOPMENT. 



337 



infinite straight line, Hegel's true infinity, of which the beau- 
tiful is a leading example, may be compared to a circle or a 
sphere, 

There is thus nothing " abstract" in Hegel's "idea," which 
is the very concrete itself, nor any unreality in his "ideal," 
which is, as we shall see, the idea as manifested, in the chief 
historical types or phases of art. 
The Beauty of a - But the " first " (simplest or lowest) existence 
Nature. Q r fa Q Idea, is in Nature, and the " first " beauty 
is the beauty of nature. 1 The beauty of nature, of course, 
exists only for the perceiving consciousness, 2 but Hegel 
devotes to it a brief separate treatment as differing from 
the beauty of art in not having been consciously produced 
with a view to aesthetic effect. He is partly influenced 
by the idea of nature as contrasted with man, and only 
includes man in his account of natural beauty as an after- 
thought, 3 and in some degree as a contrast to the beauty of 
animals. The difficulty, however, in the separate treatment of 
natural and artistic beauty, at once makes itself felt in the fact 
that landscape scenery, which is dealt with in a few words 
under this former head, is more fully spoken of when the art 
of painting comes to be discussed. 

The beauty of nature, as distinguished from man, which 
Hegel begins by considering^ was something that he did not 
fully feel. He understood that inanimate nature may be in 
apparent sympathy with human moods, but he had no de- 
tailed justification to offer for their coincidence, nor any sense 
of character and import in mountain form or cloud formation 
or water movement. His gaze is concentrated on the indi- 
vidual organism and its progressive manifestation of life, in 
which for the first time the idea seems to him to attain a 
partially adequate self-revelation, and he devotes more atten- 
tion to the plant than to the rocks, more to the animal than 
to the plant, and subsequently more to the human being than 
to the animal. 

We do not feel, I believe, this exact progression of aesthetic 
value in the ratio of organic development. The landscape, 
and plant life as the vesture of the earth, seem to us more 
yielding and sympathetic to our moods than the concentrated 
life of the individual animal ; and great as is the beauty of the 



1 ^Esthetic, i. 148. * Ib,^ 157. 3 Cf. pp. 167 and 184. 

z 



338 



HISTORY OF /ESTHETIC. 



horse or the tiger, they do not appear readily or continuously 
in our higher enjoyment of the beautiful. They are not, like 
man, spiritual in themselves ; but yet they are sufficiently 
individual to resist subordination to our general aesthetic sen- 
timents. But in exalting the beauty of the human form as 
the sole adequate incarnation of the idea, Hegel is in harmony 
with the best feeling and criticism of to-day, in spite of the 
immense recent extension of our sympathy with inanimate 
nature. 

His discussion of beauty and ugliness in the forms of 
animals, 1 is half-hearted, and seems to admit that ugliness 
may be relative. Creatures seem ugly to us, he says, whose 
forms are typical of qualities opposed to vitality in general, or 
to what we have learnt to regard as their own special or 
typical form of animate existence. Thus the sloth as want- 
ing in vitality, and the platypus as seeming to combine irre- 
concilable types, and crocodiles and many kinds of insects, 
simply, it would appear, because we are not accustomed to 
consider their forms as adequate expressions of life, are all 
regarded as ugly. This implies that below the level of man 
and art there is no absolute ugliness, a view to which I shall 
have to recur. 

Beauty of But further, as the vitality of nature even in 
Abstract Form. an i ma ] s f a H s short of characteristic individuality, 
the expression of the idea must also be looked for in 
formal and abstract attributes, 2 pervading all nature, and 
representing to sense a unity that does not amount to the 
unity of soul life. This external beauty shows itself as the 
beauty of abstract form and as the abstract unity of sensuous 
matter. Under the former head it includes those geometrical 
embodiments of unity which I have especially drawn atten- 
tion to in antique theory. Hegel enumerates them as regu- 
larity (of mere repetition), symmetry (of repetition with a 
difference), lawfulness (a far-reaching conception, applying to 
all totalities in which a number of differences are bound to- 
gether by a common law, and not merely as repetitions of 
one another : parabolic curves, Hogarth's line of beauty, the 
different lines of the human arm in two opposite contours, are 
given as examples) ; and harmony (the same relation between 
chiefly qualitative attributes as lawfulness between chiefly 



1 P, 1 66, 2 l6g ffm 



POSITION OF ABSTRACT BEAUTY. 



339 



quantitative attributes, quantity and quality passing into one 
another at this point, The relations of colour are given as 
an example. The beauty still consists in the principle of 
totality, presented through the suggestion of an agreement 
in qualities that differ). 

And in addition to this scale of principles he 

Beauty in . . . r r r 

unity of emphasises as the abstract unity oi sensuous 
sense-Material. matter what ap p earec { by their side in Plato, the 

effect of purity or simplicity in the sensuous medium, such as 
colour, tone, or even shape. Here, in passing, he refers to 
sympathy with landscape scenery as explicable in some cases 
by this principle, as when we are pleased at the clear sky, 
or the bright sea. But as a rule, even in the account of 
abstract beauty, his eye has been on individual formations, 
on crystals, plants, and animals. As regards this sensuous 
purity, which we discussed in connection with Plato and with 
Kant, we have only to note that Hegel attempts to dis- 
tinguish, as is right, between purity for sense- perception 
(freedom from sheer disturbance, as from dirt in colour, and 
from noise in tone) and simplicity of physical origin. This 
latter he mistakenly believes also to condition a peculiar kind 
of sense-impression, and he unluckily instances violet as a 
colour which is not in itself simple or one of the essential 
species of colour ! 1 

Now since natural beauty, no less than that of art, admit- 
tedly exists only for perception, we may regard the whole 
region of the beautiful as forming for Hegel, in spite of the 
contrast between nature and art, a continuous and ascending 
scale ; so that this abstract beauty becomes, as we have 
throughout considered it to be, a set of general conditions 
imposed by the formal principle of unity in variety on all 
sensuous expression qua expressive, but not exhausting the 
content even of a curve or colour, much less of any more 
individual presentation. 

But purely natural beauty — the beauty of things as com- 
mon perception sees them — is essentially defective, 2 owing to 
its incapacity, even granting that the actual human form be- 
longs to it, for representing the unity of a spiritual being at 
every point of the sensuous shape. In a striking passage 
Hegel explains how nearly the human form, in contrast to 



Violet is a primary colour. 



2 i. 180. 



340 



HISTORY OF ^ESTHETIC. 



that of animals, fulfils this requirement, 1 by the hue and 
sensitiveness of the skin, its peculiar appearance of life, and 
so on. But even the human body is overlaid with the mark- 
ings of nature and accident, and in modern times by a dress 
which resists expression ; and all this hinders the spiritual life 
from perfectly shining through its form. 

Beauty of Art; ft- It is therefore necessary that the idea, which 
the ideal. h as f oun d the fullest non-sensuous expression of 
itself in the human intelligence, should proceed as it were to 
repeat consciously the process by which it was unconsciously 
embodied in nature, and construct for itself a more adequate 
representation equally actual for sense in the second nature 
of art. Now the entire subjective aspect of this process, 
the matter which is imagined in forms capable of represen- 
tation, constitutes, according to Hegel, the Ideal, that is to 
say, the Idea so translated into the terms or tendencies of 
imagination as to be capable of direct or indirect presen- 
tation to sense. Concreteness is the bridge to artistic realisa- 



tion. 2 



Nature and the ( J ) The relation of the Ideal to Nature, with 
ideal. reference to imitation and so-called idealisation is 
simply and sufficiently stated by Hegel. 

imitation. Simple imitation he does not wholly despise, 
but, following the track of Aristotle, refers our pleasure in it 
to our " satisfaction in mental production." This satisfaction 
he is inclined to defend, as the just pride of the mind in being 
able to do with a simple material of its own choice, 3 the 
essence of what nature can only do with enormous and varied 
real resources. It may be regarded either as an exaltation 
of the thing imitated into the medium of mind, or even as an 
irony directed against mere sensuous reality. Objects thus 
imitated delight us, he says, not because they are so natural, 
but because they are made so natural. 4 This is a profound 
judgment, indulgent with the indulgence of a great mind ; for 
to a philosopher enthusiastic for the highest conceptions of 
art, nothing could be more repulsive than the reduction of it 
to sleight-of-hand in imitation. 5 The ultimate defect of pure 
imitation is, then, that it is formal, regardless of the indi- 
vidual matter or meaning of what it represents. 



P. 184. 2 See Appendix I. 3 See p. 12, supra. 
4 Cf. Introd. E. Tr., p. 82. 5 Ibid. 



ALL IDEALISATION SELECTS. 



341 



idealisation. In seizing this matter or meaning, and impres- 
sing a universal character on the perceptible imagery of repre- 
sentation, we have the second stage and true essence of fine 
art ; 1 poetry as opposed to making. However concrete and 
particular may be the forms of art, they must be different for 
having passed through the mind, which is the faculty of uni- 
versal. If the artist imitates nature, it is not because she 
has done this or that, but because she has done it right? 
Nature, in short, "is an empty indefinite phrase. 3 Poetry 
[as the general spirit of art] will always be obliged to insist 
upon the energetic, essential, distinctive, and the ideal is this 
expressive essence, not the merely actual, to represent whose 
details in any scene e.g. in a scene of every-day life, would 
be languid, spiritless, wearisome, and intolerable." 

It is plain to an observer of to-day that the two opposite 
senses of idealisation, in respect of which Hegel's masculine 
feeling sympathised strongly with Herr v. Rumohr's attack 
on the so-called followers of Winckelmann in his cultus of the 
ideal, 4 are ultimately bound up with the two opposite senses 
of the universal in logic. If the universal is the empty 
abstract, and its symbol is width of area, idealisation means 
superficiality and loss of individual content. If the universal 
is the full concrete, and its symbol is a centre with radii, 
idealisation means profound insight and wealth of individual 
characterisation. Hegel uses the latter notion in aesthetic, as 
he introduced it into logic. The two modes have in common, 
however, the physical limitations of art and its appeal to per- 
ception under definite conditions ; in both, therefore, there is 
a certain selection and omission, which facilitates the too 
ready confusion between them. 

TJ Behind this view of imitation and idealisation 

Idealisation: , r . , 

Absolute or Reia- as stages 01 the penetration 01 nature by the 
mind, there may be raised a further and more 
speculative question, namely, " Is the superiority of art to 
nature absolute or relative ?" i.e. is the idealisation necessary 



1 i. 206. 2 Jbidt 3 1 2IO 

4 " Out of this recognition (of the Greek ideal by Winckelmann) there 
arose a yearning for idealistic representation, in which people thought they 
had found beauty, but really fell into insipidity, unvitality, and characterless 
superficiality." — /Esth., i. 202. How Schasler could say (i. 386) that Hegel's 
/Esthetic contained only one short remark on Winckelmann passes my com- 
prehension. 



342 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



merely for the limitedness of our perception and the physical 
conditions of representation, or does it put into nature more 
than the greatest artist could see to be really there if his 
knowledge were unlimited, and the picture frame unnecessary ? 
Hegel is more neutral on this point in the Aesthetic than 
might be expected from his philosophy of nature, in which he 
seems to treat the natural as contingent. In the Esthetic 
he speaks of the uniform, direct and solidly coherent sequences 
of nature as a corrective of arbitrary conventionalism in art, 1 
and treats the question whether art or nature is the more 
beautiful in mere form as empirical, and not to be settled by 
theory. 2 I do not believe that he ever thought of Nature 
as contingent in the sense of being uncaused or outside the 
reign of law. Its contingency probably meant for him its 
apparent indifference to human purposes. He undoubtedly 
thought, however, that the Ideal ( = the beauty of art) had 
undergone an actual change by passing through the human 
mind, and was charged with something more than the deepest 
insight could find in nature, including man as he is in the 
prose life of every day. We probably still assent to this judg- 
ment, but with considerable deductions arising from our new 
sympathy with the reason displayed in the inanimate world. 
The art of music, it must be remembered, at once breaks down 
any attempt to say in general theory that the real world of art 
in no way transcends that of external existence. 

Subject to the reservation which has been indicated, and 
which is practically represented by the life-work of Ruskin, 
Hegel's treatment of the Ideal is the greatest single step 
that has ever been made in aesthetic. Winckelmann had 
portrayed the Ideal as in its perfection one and abstract. 
Kant, while recognising it as an embodiment of life, had on 
this very ground excluded it from aesthetic, because relative 
to the will. It was Hegel who while maintaining its aesthetic 
nobility in the sense of Winckelmann, and crediting it with 
the full aesthetic purity demanded but denied to it by Kant, 
at the same time accepted the extension and differentiations of 
it so as to constitute the principle and matter of art in all its 
phases and limits. As an illustration of the mode in which 
even the commonest nature may enter into the Ideal or the 
beauty of art, Hegel in this discussion of its relation to 



1 Introd. E. Tr., 87. 2 i. 217. 



DUTCH PAINTING. 



343 



nature 1 briefly anticipates the eloquent defence of Dutch and 
German paintings, which forms the conclusion of the special 
section on painting in the third volume. 

The ideal in Life (2) It was natural considering the novelty of 
and Action, attempt to break down the wall of abstraction 
round the Ideal, that Hegel should devote nearly one-eighth 



1 I subjoin this defence in its shorter form given in the discussion of the 
Ideal, because it is an excellent illustration of Hegel's critico-historical treat- 
ment, and of the range and depth of the ideal as he conceived it. Serious 
objections are now taken against the Dutch school in particular both on 
general grounds and with reference to their colouring. (Ruskin, A. F., 5. 24.) 
I have not the special knowledge which would entitle me to offer an opinion 
on this latter head, and Hegel's apology only deals with their range of subject, 
and with the spirit in which they approached it. 

"[The Dutch genre-paintings] ought not simply to be thrown. aside under 
the title of common (mean) nature. If we look close at the -real' content of 
these pictures it is not so ' common ' as is generally thought. 

"The Dutch chose the content of their representations from the present of 
their own life, and they are not to be censured for having realised this present 
over again in the medium of art. What is- brought before the eyes and heart 
of the living world must be something that belongs to it, if it is to claim its 
interest to the full. To know what interested the Dutch at that time we 
must ask their history. The Dutchman had to- a great extent created the 
very soil on which he lived and worked, and was compelled continually to 
defend and preserve it against the onset of the sea ; townsmen and peasants 
alike, by spirit, endurance, and bravery had cast off " the Spanish dominion 
under Philip II., son of Charles V., that mighty prince of this world, and 
along with political liberty had conquered for themselves freedom of religion, 
and that in the religion of the free. It is this civic spirit and enterprise in 
small things as in great, in their own country and on the- high seas,, their 
frugal, yet neat and cleanly housewifery, and the pride and' pleasure of the 
self-consciousness that they owe it all to their own activity — it is alF this that 
constitutes the general substance of their pictures. This is not a low matter 
and argument, to be regarded with the patrician insolence of "good society " 
from the vantage-ground of courts and their manners. It is this intelligent 
cheerfulness in a well-earned enjoyment, which pervades even the animal 
pieces, and shows itself as pleasure and physical satisfaction, and it is this 
fresh and wakeful freedom and vitality of mind in apprehension and presen- 
tation that forms the highest aspect of these pictures." After comparing with 
them as of the same general species, some beggar children of Murillo, as 
"contented and happy almost like the Olympian gods . , . human 
beings harmoniously created, with no vexation or discontent in them," he 
ends by observing that such genre pictures ought to be of small size, so as to 
pass for something trivial. They would be intolerable if they made the claim 
upon us of being represented in life size. "This," he concludes, referring to 
the whole passage, " is how ' common ' Nature must be felt, in order to be fit 
for art." — /Esth., i. 212. 



344 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



of his entire set of lectures 1 to the perfectly general question, 
not, what shapes it must assume in entering into concrete 
life, but, how it can enter into life at all. It is in this discus- 
sion that he points to a heroic past as the best ground for the 
art of individual character, being evidently impressed by the 
conflict of individual courage with orderly civilisation depicted 
in different relations in Gotz v. Berlichingen, Don Quixote 
and the Rduber. In a civilised social order, for example, 
the punishment 2 of crime no longer depends on individual 
heroism ; it is not even a single action, but is broken up into 
parts played by separate agents — police, judge and jury, 
gaoler or executioner. Thus the great moral powers of 
society no longer reside in the breast of particular persons but 
in the co-operation of millions, and the latter relation is more 
difficult of portrayal than the former. 

This view coheres with the whole conception of art as, in 
its evolution, tending to pass out of the most strictly artistic 
region, and as not possessing in modern civilisation the same 
sole supremacy that it claimed in the Periclean age, or in the 
first flush of the Renascence. Whatever we may think of 
the future of fine art, the facts which favour such a concep- 
tion are patent and undeniable ; and, if disputed, it must be 
so disputed as to allow these facts their due weight. 3 

The whole of this part of the work, constituting as it were 
a complete analysis of action in general into the elements of 
its necessary context — the spirit of the age, the situation, the 
collision of duties, the motive, the character — is directed to 
showing how "ideality" can be maintained in the treatment 
of the most detailed complications and serious aspects of life ; 
while the false " ideal," the fancy of a golden age or idyllic 
existence, 4 fails of true ideality by the very withdrawal from 
vigorous concreteness which was meant to constitute its 
beauty. In Hermann and Dorothea, it is pointed out, 
Goethe avoids this weakness with marvellous skill, by setting 



1 i- i93-3 6 5- 2 i- 2 3 2 - 

3 lb. " However excellent we think the statues of the Greek gods, how- 
ever nobly and perfectly God the Father and Christ and Mary may be 

^portrayed, it makes no difference, our knees no longer bend." He has 
just said that we may hope for the continual progress of art, only its form has 
ceased to meet the supreme need of our age. It is untrue that he thinks art 
^to be " played out." 

4 i.325. He is speaking primarily of Gessner. 



ART-FORMS AND ARTS. 



345 



the domestic story against the dark background of the revo- 
lutionary war. Before leaving this part of the system it is 
well to notice that the section on Abstract Externality 1 as an 
element in the expression of the Ideal is almost a reproduction 
of the section on " the external beauty of abstract Form " 2 as 
an element in the expressiveness of nature. The editors 
are probably responsible for the repetition, but Hegel must 
have treated the subject in both places on different occasions. 
The untenableness of a working distinction between the 
beauty of Nature and that of Art could not be more strik- 
ingly illustrated. 
Evolution of (3) After this general discussion about the 

the ideal. relation of the Ideal to particulars, the actual 
self-particularisation of the Ideal is represented as a process, 
according to the simple dialectic indicated above ; 3 and this 
process is the framework of the entire system. 

It will be seen from the extract printed in the Appendix 
that in the first place the whole world of imagined beauty or 
concrete fancy, which is called the " ideal," is conceived as 
passing through phases determined by the progression of 
intelligence and also by the cumulative result of the sequence 
itself. And in the second place, the human mind being at all 
time a many-sided whole, the same needs of expression which 
thus separate themselves each into its own successive phase 
in time, also appear, as a co-existing group of modes of fancy, 
relative to different media of expression, within each of the 
great historical forms or stages of the "ideal" or art-con- 
sciousness. 

The former set of successive phases are what Hegel calls 
the three forms of art, symbolic, classical, and romantic, and 
taken together make up the main outline of the historical 
evolution of the ideal. 

The latter group of co-existing modes of expression, a 
group which repeats itself within each of the historical art- 
forms, is the system of the several arts, primarily differentiated 
from each other by the sensuous vehicles which they re- 
spectively employ. 

Therefore the whole set of particular arts, Architecture, 
Sculpture, Painting, Music, and Poetry, recurs within each 
of the three progressive Art-Forms, the Symbolic, the Classical, 



1 i- 3 2 5- 



2 i. 169. 



3 ^ 335. 



346 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



and the Romantic. And the same needs of expression being 
at the root of both differentiations of the ideal, the successive 
and the simultaneous, it follows that though all the arts recur 
in each epoch, yet in each recurrence one or more of them 
have a prerogative rank, depending on the coincidence of 
their special tendency with the spirit of the age within which 
they then are. 

Thus for the symbolic art-form architecture is central or 
characteristic — for the classical art-form, sculpture — and for 
the romantic art-form, in conformity with its greater mo- 
bility and variety, the three remaining arts, painting, music, 
and poetry, are characteristic, but music above all is the central 
romantic art. 1 

The dialectic continuity which underlies the progression of 
these historical forms of art may be simply expressed as 
follows. We start with man's universal need to set the seal 
of his inner being on the world without, in order to recognise 
himself therein. 2 

The symbolic The first gropings of the mind after sensuous 
Art-form. expression are like dreams, often like nightmares ; 
the spirit of man is not yet fully awake, and lays its half- 
formed fancies arbitrarily in the objects of sense. 3 This is in 
Hegel's language symbolic art, not in the wide sense in which 
all art appeals to natural symbolism, 4 but in the narrow sense 
in which a symbol is opposed to an embodiment or repre- 
sentation. Here all is arbitrary and irrational, a search for 
adequate expression, because nothing is yet formed which is 
adequate to be expressed. 

The classical But the half-formed is on the way to the fully 
Art-form. formed. The awakening mind reacts against its 
nightmares 5 by realising its own nature as a compact and 
definite self in a compact and definite world of relations, and 
seizes for the representation of its definite reasonable unity 



1 See extract in Appendix, on Music. 

2 See Introd. to &sth., E. Tr., 59. 

3 See Ruskin on Indian Art. Aratra Pentdici, 226, and Two Paths, 11. 

4 See Kant on the Symbol, above. 

5 How profound is this view we are now learning more thoroughly year by 
year, as we trace the long preparation in which the Greek spirit learned what 
it needed from Oriental sources, only to put all monstrosity under its feet, and 
rise up like Ethert Brand, in the fairest human form. 



hegel's sources. 



347 



the natural and adequate symbol furnished by the human 
figure. 

The Romantic In the world- movement, however, the compact 
Art-form. anc j definite self is no enduring phase. The little 
Greek sphere of fixed natural relations is torn asunder by the 
great historical forces operative both within and without it, 
and the idea, assuming the form of a progressive antithesis, 
in which the Greek past is itself a factor, can no longer 
be adequately represented in a compact and simple shape, 
but demands embodiment, if not actually in thought, then in 
some medium of sense as nearly as possible approximating 
to thought. 

At this point we may recall the sources of the conception 
before us. The combination of these three stages with the 
three sets of particular fine arts suggests a connection with 
Schelling's " powers"; that is to say, the process which 
generated the three successive forms of art is again repre- 
sented within each one of them by the division into particular 
fine arts. The distinction again between " classical " and 
" romantic," which is essentially that between the simple or 
fixed and the divided or moving, is drawn in material from 
the historical contrast with which we dealt at length in the 
" Data of modern aesthetic," and in form from Schelling's 
antithesis of " Natural " and " Historical," itself derived from 
Schiller's Naive and Sentimental. The whole notion of a 
concrete idea as the reality, is referred, we must bear in mind 
throughout, by Hegel to Schiller. The direction assigned to 
the movement from classical to romantic makes explicit, as 
Schelling himself does not, the notion latent in his "real" 
and "ideal" series of arts. The addition of the symbolic 
art-form as a pre-classical stage is a reflex, materially, of the 
interest excited by the Schlegels and other Romanticists in 
Oriental poetry and antiquities, and thus the parallel drawn 
by Hegel between the Symbolic and the Romantic tendency 
corresponds to the fact that the same anti-classical contrast 
and rebellion brought the data of both into notice. The 
technical term Symbolic appears to be a special application 
of the idea of symbol or allegory, the former being extended to 
the whole of art by Solger, and the latter by Fr. v. Schlegel. 1 
It is needless to say that the notion of the " classical" which 



1 i. 392, cf. Zimm., A., i. 698. 



348 



HISTORY OF AESTHETIC. 



forms the centre of the whole evolution is in the spirit of 
Winckelmann and draws its sterling soundness from Hegel's 
intense sympathy with him and with his subject. And finally, 
the exceedingly suggestive treatment of the Ideal, not as an 
exclusive phase of Art, but as the whole range of fancy that 
is reacted on and specialised into concreteness by the general 
demands of expression in each age, and further by the par- 
ticular sensuous vehicles which determine the powers of the 
several fine arts, is probably, I submit, due to Schilling's idea 
of mythology as a sine qua non for art. For this mythology 
essentially meant the organised province of imagination applic- 
able to a particular range of artistic production. The modern, 
as we know, had, according to Schelling, to make his mytho- 
logy for himself out of the material given to the intelligence 
of his age. This concrete aspect of the imagination in itself 
and apart from the actual work of production, has never, so 
far as I am aware, been duly noted by professional art-philoso- 
phers except in a degree by Schelling and Hegel, and in one 
particular region by writers on music. That not only the 
musician imagines in tones, and the poet in ideas, but the 
sculptor in marble, 1 the ironworker in iron, the wood-carver 
in wood, and the painter in colour — this is the vital principle 
which lies at the root of the due classification of the arts, and 
is thoroughly comprehended in Hegel's "ideal." 

" This highly trained skill in the thoroughly perfect mani- 
pulation of the material is involved in the notion of the Ideal, 
as it has for its principle the total incorporation in the sensuous 
and the fusion of the inward spirit with the outward being." 2 
The demands of execution are subsequently and separately 
treated, so that we must clearly grasp that Hegel is here 
speaking of the artistic imagination qua imagination only, and 
requires even so that it should be moulded, so to speak, by 
habitual intercourse with its material. Thus the differentia- 
tion of the ideal leads up to the classification of the arts. 



1 That is, of course, in ideas of form, but in ideas of form suggested, 
moulded, and modified by the habitual feeling of what it is to express oneself 
in marble. The modern sculptor, it would seem, thinks in clay ! See Colling- 
wood, Ruskin's Art Teaching, 281, and Hegel quoting Winckelmann,.^., 
ii. 442. 

2 Hegel, ib. The strictures on working in clay only, for marble statues, 
follow this passage. 



THE DOUBLE CLASSIFICATION. 



349 



Classification of (4) Hegel's classification of the arts is briefly 
the Arts, explained by himself in the abstract printed in the 
Appendix. It is only necessary here to comment on three 
distinctive points concerning it. 

The Double Basis If the combination on which it rests was 

of classification, thoroughly carried out, each separate art would 
be treated in three forms, symbolic, classical, and romantic, 
just as each of these three art-forms would be pursued through 
the peculiarities of the five different arts. Thus the classifica- 
tion is founded upon a combined historical and analytic prin- 
ciple, which is supposed by Hegel to represent the same 
differentiation, both in succession, and in co-existences repeated 
within phases of the succession. The culminating point of 
the group of particular fine arts at any period is thus to be 
found in that branch of art which corresponds within the co- 
existent system to the then dominant phase of the succession. 
Architecture, the art of incomplete symbolism, is the climax 
of preclassical or merely symbolic art ; sculpture, the art of 
complete and compact though limited expressiveness, is the 
climax of classical or self-complete and balanced artistic pro- 
duction of the Greek age, and so on. 

The recent historians of aesthetic agree in condemning 
this double principle of classification. Schasler 1 thinks that it 
contradicts itself in treating a single art under more than one 
form, although he sees that the empirical facts give some 
support to such a method. Hartmann 2 considers that the 
confusion between the division of forms of style (!) and the 
division of the particular arts is fatal to Hegel's whole system, 
and especially he complains that the "confusion " recurs with- 
in the treatment of each separate branch of art. Zimmer- 
mann 3 makes similar criticisims on the intermixture of histor- 
ical and philosophical principles, and on the feature of recur- 
rence, and, in addition, can find no distinction between the 
symbolic and the romantic, and infers that both of these, being 
inadequate in form to their import, must fall outside beauty. 

From Zimmermann, an able writer of the Herbartian school, 
and a pure formalist in aesthetic, no other criticism could be 
expected. He thinks that history should be severed from 
philosophy as absolutely as the story of Newton's apple from 
astronomical theory. " The conception of symbolism would 



1 982. 2 i. 536. 3 i. 709 ff. 



35o 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



exist if there had never been a work of art bearing that char- 
acter, nor a period, nor a people devoted to it." 1 This is 
indeed the high priori road. The conception of linguistic 
or algebraical symbolism would no doubt have existed if only 
language and algebra had existed and fine art had never been 
heard of. But whether out of these essentially different species 
of the genus the conception of aesthetic symbolism would have 
been generated, if no aesthetic sensibility had ever been ob- 
served, I must take leave to doubt. The whole nature of 
the philosophical sciences is here at issue. 

When on the other hand Schasler and Hartmann, both of 
them in name objective idealists, take a similar view of a 
German thinker, a foreigner hesitates to express an opposite 
opinion. It will be simplest to attach the observations which 
appear necessary to a short recapitulation of the empirical 
facts which suggested and support the treatment in question. 
Facts that None of the philosophical sciences are as 

support the independent of history as the exact sciences. 

Double Basis, -ni *i 1 • • 11 11 1 • 

rnilosopny is essentially concrete ; and though its 
principles are bound to be clear, its logical sequences coherent, 
and its distinctions objective, yet even in Logic, the abstrac- 
tion of abstractions, it is wholly impossible to motive and 
correlate the phenomena without referring to their empirical 
context in the more and less developed language and intel- 
ligence of peoples. Yet in Logic we are dealing on the 
whole with a system of which the parts, the individual sciences, 
are able to co-exist in their highest form and vitality. In 
aesthetic this is not so, and in spite of the unity of art all evi- 
dence points to the conclusion that it cannot possibly be so. 

Architecture was the most important art of the pre-classical 
period and extra-classical world, though in this world and 
period we do not find the culmination of architecture. This 
is all that the theory absolutely requires ; but the other arts 
comply with it less grudgingly. Sculpture was the pride of 
Greek art, and in Greek art we find the greatest achievements 
of pure sculpture. For us, Greek painting and music hardly 
exist ; and though this, if a sheer accident, ought not to influ- 
ence our theories (as it probably has influenced them) yet we 
know enough to conjecture with likelihood that acquaintance 
with these productions would not, when brought into compar- 



Zimmermann, i. 711. 



THE DOUBLE CLASSIFICATION. 



35 1 



ison with their modern correlatives, have profoundly modified 
our ideas of the history of art. Greek poetry is, beyond any 
doubt, romantic in comparison to Greek sculpture, and plastic 
or narrowly classical in comparison to modern poetic art. 
Painting and music, as we know them, practically begin with 
the modern world, and music in particular attains greatness 
after the impulse of formative art, if not wholly exhausted, 
had lost its centrality and certainty of achievement. Not 
only are these arts romantic par excellence as compared 
with the sculpture and architecture even of modern times, 
but they attained their culmination, so far as history has yet 
gone, within the romantic development, and as a whole, 1 in 
separate and distinct epochs. With reference to poetry, the 
universal art, it would indeed be unbecoming to speak of a 
modern superiority so far as excellence is concerned ; but 
in that which separates poetry from the other arts, its pro- 
foundness, its freedom, and its spirituality, it cannot be denied 
that modern poetry is more poetic and less " plastic " than 
that of Greece. 

Now in every classification it is well to begin by exactly 
framing or limiting the matter which we propose to classify, 
and in view of these facts which show the disparateness of 
much of our material, this framing is automatically effected 
with singular felicity by subordinating the analytic distinction 
of the arts to the historical distinction of the art-forms. Thus 
when Hegel treats at length of symbolic classical and roman- 
tic 2 architecture, we understand that these three forms are 
essential distinctions in architecture, and that architecture 
again is the "symbolic" species par excellence in each of these 
art-forms. It is idle to treat of architecture or sculpture, as 
Hartmann does, by mere general analysis, avoiding all refer- 
ence to their characteristic periods ; the natural peculiarities 
of the object-matter are neglected, and nine-tenths of the 
important phenomena are omitted. The relation, for example, 
of fine architecture to building or engineering on the one 
hand and to sculpture on the other is thus discussed, wholly 



1 Turner was contemporary with Beethoven, but this can hardly break down 
the statement in the text. For all we yet know, Turner was an isolated genius. 
At least he is not connected with the first prime of modern art. 

2 Hegel's treatment of this is much influenced by Goethe's Deutsche 
Baukunst. See A., ii. 332. 



35 2 



HISTORY OF ^ESTHETIC. 



without reference to the actual development of architectural 
decoration in the greatest periods, and to the position of the 
artist-workman in regard to Greek, and again in regard to 
romantic, ornament. The most important issues are conse- 
quently either unmentioned or just baldly alluded to. 1 The 
wholly unfree character imputed by Hartmann to architec- 
ture and all the minor arts and crafts cuts a troublesome 
knot conveniently at first sight, but leave the far worse 
perplexity behind, that on this view some beautiful art qua 
beautiful is unfree. Nothing but a more appreciative treat- 
ment, such as even in a short abstract 2 that of Hegel is 
seen to be, can combine the truth of Hartmann's idea with 
that of Ruskin's equally extreme doctrine that architecture is 
throughout subordinate to sculpture. 
Principle of V' ^ ut wnen > leaving the successive art-forms, 
Analytic we come to consider the co-existing system of the 

Classification. j r • iri ^' • 

arts, a definite ground 01 classification is unques- 
tionably necessary. Here, as often happens, the wealth of 
Hegel's knowledge and industry has disconcerted his critics 
and even his followers. 

At the close of the chapter printed in the Appendix, Hegel 
mentions two possible abstract principles of classification ; the 
sensuous medium, and the relation to space and time. The 
former might be treated either with reference to the actual 
material employed, or, as in a fuller passage, 3 with reference 
to the effect on the spectator's perception. Schasler 4 is un- 
able to see why, having mentioned this basis of division, in 
the latter passage, he at once lets it fall (and we might add, 
that of space and time also), and recurs to the principle of 
symbolic classical and romantic as the only one which is really 
concrete. 

These others, it should be noted, may be taken as exhaust- 
ing the principles in vogue both before and after Hegel. Kant 
and Schelling had divided the arts of form from the art which 
makes use of speech, and Hegel observes that this results 



1 Let any reader compare Hartmann's treatment of architecture in vols, 
i. and ii. of the ^Esthetic with the chapter on the " Nature of Gothic " in 
Ruskin's Stones of Venice ; or with the passages quoted from Wm. Morris, 
above pp. 95 and 124, or with the chapter "Architecture" in Mr. Collingwood's 
vol. on Ruskin's Art Teaching, or with the discussion in Prof. Baldwin Brown's 
Fine Arts, and then'turn to Hegel on " Romantic Architecture," sEsih., ii. 332. 
2 See App. I. 3 A., ii. 2^3. 4 1003. 



A CONCRETE PRINCIPLE. 



from the division according to organs of sense, except that 
music, which Schelling threw in with the arts of form, must be 
separated as by Kant qua art of sound, while the speaking 
art is more truly to be reckoned as one whose medium is 
imagination. Thus modified, the division is practically that of 
Hartmann (Arts of the eye, Arts of the ear, Art of the fancy). 
Lessing, on the other hand, had, we remember, distinguished 
formative art from poetry (music was not within his horizon) 
by their relations to space and time, which in the form of rest 
and motion are the principles of Schasler's division. Now 
why does Hegel let fall, after mentioning them, both these 
principles, and recur to the threefold division of art-forms ? 
Simply because, in motiving this latter division he is able to 
exhaust the content of both these abstract principles, while, 
even taken together, they are not sufficient to found a division 
upon. 

We should observe that he employs 1 the first, before drop- 
ping it, to clear the ground by excluding the non-aesthetic 
senses of touch, taste, and smell ; the two latter as dealing with 
matter in process of dissolution and therefore as destructive 
if not appetitive in their relation to the object, and the former 
as in contact only with the pure particular as such, and conse- 
quently unable to apprehend a systematic unity in sensuous 
form. This is probably the true differentia of non-aesthetic 
senses, and all other non-aesthetic characteristics in them are 
only of importance as conditions or results of this. 

The point then of Hegel's concrete principle of division, by 
which he simply enquires into the powers and conditions of the 
several arts as human activities producing a certain effect by 
more or less material means, is this, that by not tying himself 
down to any abstract principle he is able to let each art stand 
out free in its full individuality, instead of ranking painting with 
sculpture against music with poetry, or the like. If, for example, 
we approach the question simply as one of sensuous appear- 
ance to the observer, then we lose all touch of the material 
which sets his task to the artist ; but this is the essential 
difference e.g. between sculpture and painting ; moreover, all 
formative arts at least are essentially athletic, 2 and through 
their relation to the artist we obtain an invaluable insight into 
the nature of expressive self-utterance which later criticism 



1 A., ii. 253. 



2 Collingwood, p. 242. 

A A 



354 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



in England has independently developed. The character of 
each individual art is thus scrutinised by Hegel with a view 
to the coincidence between its expressive capacity as a whole 
and any content or import which it appears especially fitted 
to embody. For it is on the balance and reaction between 
expression and import that the distinction of the art-forms 
hinges. No parallel series are established. The analogy 
between architecture and music is simply noted, by the side of 
other analogies which music presents, as is a somewhat un- 
promising resemblance between sculpture and epic poetry. 

The result on the whole is a linear classification, represent- 
ing the increasing ideality of the arts in terms of all the bases 
of division which I have mentioned, more gradually and more 
justly than the real and ideal series of Schelling and many 
others, and allowing, by the method that has been described, 
for the enormous difference between the " ideal " art of poetry 
in Greek and in modern times. The intervals between the 
arts may be imagined as equal, for the three romantic arts are 
allowed full and free individuality within their class-heading, 
and music in particular is for the first time put in its true 
place as the art in which pure feeling and necessary structural 
form — the two extremes of the mental world — are brought 
into absolute oneness, so that without any recognisable object 
or idea the movement of things 1 in as far it interests our feel- 
ing is built up into an organic and necessary fabric. 

It has been said that Hegel's classification is a descending 
series. 2 This is not so ; the romantic arts are the culmination 
of art as such, though it is mere truth to say that they are not 
the culmination of beauty in the narrower sense. Whether art, 
in attaining its culmination, does not tend to pass beyond itself, 3 
just as in architecture it has not wholly attained its idea, is 
another question ; and whatever the future may have in store 
(which is no subject for philosophy) there is no doubt that the 
whole ground and content of life, being thoroughly reflective 
and intellectual, is quite otherwise related to the beautiful to- 
day than it was in Greece or in the Middle Ages. 4 In saying 
that the art-spirit is essentially in evolution we do not deny 
that the evolution may be renewed on a higher level than 
before. 



1 ALsth., iii. 145. 2 Hartmann, i. 127. 

3 A., ii. 234 ff. 4 See esp. /£sth. y ii. 232. 



VALUE OF " NEGATION." 



355 



in. It is undoubtedly difficult to get a net result 

Four Leading r , T t T > • r i • i • 

conceptions out of Hegel. Being aware of this quality, 
deaned. w hether as I think, a merit, or as the reader may 
think, a defect, I will attempt before passing on to put to- 
gether his views on four cardinal points of aesthetic, w r hich, 
taken in combination, limit, begin, and end his account of the 
beautiful. Beauty itself, we may hope, has been sufficiently 
defined ; in its narrower sense by the classical ideal, in its 
wider sense by the whole evolution of the art-forms. 

(i) No systematic treatment is devoted to 
ugliness. U gli n ess. We gather from a passage on carica- 
ture 1 that ugliness always involves distortion. This I take 
to mean the suggestion of a type by a presentation which, in 
suggesting, parodies it. The reference 2 to natural ugliness 
confirms this; it appears to be there treated as relative to 
our habitual judgment of typical character, though this does 
not exclude the possibility that our judgment may be ob- 
jective. False characterisation seems then to be the essence 
of ugliness. 

There is a curious and instructive problem as to whether 
ugliness proper is present in the imperfect or symbolic phase 
of the ideal. Here the vicious and uncouth presentation of, 
say, an Indian idol, has its viciousness duly grounded in that 
of the content, the conception of Deity, which is to be ex- 
pressed. For this reason, I presume, Hegel seems to shrink 
from applying to such forms as these the technical word 
" ugly " (hasslich), though he describes them as vicious, 
distorted, deformed. They are, he says, not beautiful, 3 but 
as attempting to express the absolute in plainly inadequate 
form they have a certain analogy to the sublime. The fact 
is that Hegel's notion of beauty is so positive throughout, 
that he is not led to devote any special treatment to what, as 
its negation, falls outside his track of enquiry. If we can 
exhaust the positive, we can easily infer the place of the 
different kinds of negative. So far his method is far more 
instructive than many which are purely schematic. Opposite, 
contrary, counter-part, negation, are all of them mere formal 
terms, and tell us nothing at all unless we know the context 
and mode of genesis of the opposition or negation in question. 
But if we know the latter points, the technical terms can be 



1 Introd., E. Tr., 43. 2 Su/ra, p. 338. 3 i. 427. 



356 



HISTORY OF AESTHETIC. 



readily supplied. In Hegel the ugly is, it would seem, the 
positive negation of a typical content, given as the portrayal 
of that content, i.e. the analogue of falsehood or confusion 
of relations. The character of Moliere's miser is called an 
ugly (hasslich) abstraction ; I imagine because it is a partial 
character alleged as a portrait of a concrete man. Rudeness, 
austerity, and the grotesque are not ugliness ; the romantic 
ideal intentionally turns its back on classical beauty without 
leaving the realm of beauty as such. Common life qua 
common, in which no great character 1 is perceptible, is the 
world of prose as contrasted with the general poetic sphere of 
art, but is not spoken of as ugly. 

(2) The sublime in the strict sense 2 lies at the 
threshold of beauty, and belongs to the " sym- 
bolic " art-form. As the basis of his treatment of it Hegel 
quotes from Kant: 3 44 The strictly sublime can be contained 
in no sensuous form, but attaches to ideals of reason, which 
although no adequate representation is possible for them, are 
yet stirred up and evoked in the mind by this very inadequacy, 
which can be represented in sensuous form." The sublime in 
general, Hegel continues, is the attempt to express the infinite 
without finding in the realm of phenomena any object which 
proves itself fitting for this representation. 

As a case of inadequate expression it is akin to the ugly or 
at least to the deformed and monstrous of the symbolic (its 
own) phase of art. We remember that to Schiller the same 
appearance might be both ugly and sublime. But yet these 
montrosities have only "an echo of the sublime," because they 
half satisfy, or are taken to satisfy, the need of expression by 
the very distortion, or magnitude, barbaric splendour and the 
like (false or endless infinity), which makes them monstrous ; 
whereas, in the true sublime, a sharp consciousness of inade- 
quacy is required. 

The purest type of this consciousness is found in Jewish 
religious poetry, which contrasts all created things as perish- 
able being, 4 with the one abstract God, in the sense that no 
creature can be supposed in any way to represent Him ; so 
that this true sublime cannot take the shape of formative art, 
but only of poetry. This ascription of sublimity to the relation 
between the Jewish God and the created world is as old 



1 i. 190. 2 i. 455- 



3 K. d. U., p. 99. 4 i. 466. 



SUBLIME AND ROMANTIC. 



357 



as Longinus, as Hegel points out 1 with reference to the 
example : " Let there be light, and there was light." Burke 
takes an instance from Job ; and Kant, in a noble passage, 2 
finds the highest type of the sublime in the very prohibition 
of the Decalogue, " Thou shalt not make to thyself any 
graven image/' comparing it in spirit with the non-sensuous 
character which he ascribes to the moral law. The Psalms, 
Hegel continues, give for all time classical specimens of true 
sublimity, in the exaltation of the feelings which passes over 
everything else to worship the power of God only. 3 Nothing 
in the universe, they insist, can claim independence, for every- 
thing exists simply by His power and as subservient to Him. 

It is instructive to compare this estimate of the Psalms in 
the work of a great systematic philosopher, with the continual 
reference to them in Ruskin, who while feeling their sublimity 
to the full, does not appreciate the entire hostility to the spirit 
of formative art, nor the temper of separation between God 
and man, in which they are conceived. 

" Sublimity," Hegel says at this point, " involves on the 
side of man the feeling of his own finiteness and his insuper- 
able remoteness from God." The conception of immortality, 
therefore, cannot exist at this stage. The consciousness of 
God as law is the germ of a more affirmative relation to him. 

The sublime, though entering into the symbolic phase of 
the ideal, is specifically distinct from beauty and the ideal in 
the narrower or classical sense. 4 Still more is it incompatible 
with the romantic art-form in which the absolute is received 
into the individual subject in the form of love, " the ideal of 
romantic art"; 5 and man himself, at one with God, becomes 
the expression of the infinite. The depths of import in 
romantic art, which " turns its back on classical beauty," 6 
make it possible, indeed, to extend the idea of sublimity as 
other writers have done, through all the more serious ex- 
pressions of the relation between the individual man and the 
universe, as for example, through the sphere of religious and 
tragic feeling. Here, however, the question becomes verbal. 



i i. 4 63. 2 IC d , C7 - ) I34 _ 5 . 

3 i. 471. The 104th and 90th Psalms are those which he quotes, laying 
stress on such verses as civ. 29 : "Thou hidest Thy face, they are troubled ; 
Thou takest away their breath, they die," etc., and xc. 5, 6, 7 : Thou earnest 
them away as with a flood," etc. 

4 i. 466. 5 ii. 150. G ii. 124, 133. 



358 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



I need only point out that Hegel's usage is limited by a clear 
logical and historical differentia — the sense of inadequate 
expression ; while any modern phenomena in which this 
sense appears to revive, as for the individual in his weakness 
and particularity it plainly may, are most simply treated as 
sublime by analogy. The individual, in any stage of culture, 
includes and may reproduce at times any past phase of human 
feeling. 

T^e Tra -c ^ ^ ^ e tragic is therefore, in Hegel's eyes, 
" e ragiC * outside the sublime. As a poetic form it is the 
greatest achievement both of classical and of romantic art. 
It depends, primarily, on the collision of real spiritual forces, 
such as the family and the state, in individuals whose action 
has therefore an aspect both of rightness and of wrongness. 
And these forces, especially in ancient tragedy, forming the 
substance of the individual personality, cannot be detached 
therefrom, and involve, in the issue by which the conflict re- 
stores unity to the spiritual world, the destruction of the 
persons who represent them. This identification of the entire 
personalities with their substantive aims or rights, is the 
secret of the unhappy ending which Aristotle thought the 
better in ancient tragedy. His underlying reason plainly was 
that the happy ending, which he contemptuously assigns to 
comedy, involves the abandonment of essential purpose by 
the persons of the drama. Hegel's short account of the 
Antigone explains his conception better than any comment. 1 

"The completest species of this development is possible, 
when the persons in conflict appear, in respect of their concrete 
being [individuality, birth, position, etc.], each as including the 
whole of the sphere concerned. They then, in their own 
nature, are in the power of that against which they do battle, 
and injure that, which by the law of their own existence they 
ought to honour. So, for example, Antigone lives within 
Kreon's civil authority ; she herself is a king's daughter, and 
the betrothed of Haemon, so that she was bound to pay 
obedience to the sovereign's command. Yet Kreon, too, who 
on his side is father and husband, was bound to respect the 
sanctity of blood-relationship, and not to command what 
violated that piety. Thus each of them has immanent in him- 
or herself that against which they respectively rebel, and 



1 iii- 556. 



TRAGEDY. 



359 



they are seized and broken by that very principle which be- 
longs to the sphere of their own being. Antigone suffers 
death unwed, but Kreon too is punished in his son and in 
his wife, who seek their own death, the one because of Anti- 
gone's end, and the other because of Harmon's. Of all that is 
noble in the ancient and modern world — I know pretty nearly 
all of it, and it is right and possible to know it — the Anti- 
gone appears to me, from this point of view, the most excel- 
lent, the most satisfying, work of art." 

In the more subjective solution of the CEdipus at Golonus, 
Hegel finds a beginning of modernism, though no anticipation 
of the Christian consciousness, which is not, like the Greek, 
restored or reconciled within the intelligence, but rather dis- 
owns altogether its earthly being. In modern tragedy, then, 
the depth and interest of individuality and the formal main- 
tenance of its consistency, in some degree take the place of 
the single moral right and duty constituting the whole person- 
ality. The surrounding circumstances are admitted in all their 
variety and contingency, and there is therefore a difficulty in 
keeping the necessary connection between the character and 
the issues of the plot. In the Shakespearian drama the 
character is made to work itself out inevitably, exhibiting and 
accepting in itself the consequences of its action. But if the 
connection between character and issues is lost, and the story 
becomes one of pure innocence oppressed by the chances of 
a hostile world, then the tragic element is destroyed, and the 
effect is no longer tragic, but an idle or futile melancholy or 
horror. 1 

When on the other hand the conflict of aims or interests 
reacts on the character, in virtue of its subjectivity, so as to 
produce a harmonious whole without sacrifice of individual 
lives, as is the case in a few ancient dramas, e.g. the Philoc- 
tetes, then the law of tragedy, which consists in the sacrifice 
of individuals to principles or aims inseparable from them, is 
abandoned, and we have the modern "drama of real life," 2 
which may arise, as Lessing explained, either out of tragedy 
or out of comedy. Shakespeare seems purposely to distin- 
guish certain plays as tragic by the sacrifice of individual life, 
but a comedy like Measure for Measure touches all depths 
of mental suffering. There is a risk in the modern drama of 



1 573- 



2 539- 



360 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



the whole development being thrown into the mere charac- 
ter, without a substantive aim to give it continuity, so that the 
knave is converted, and forgiven, but we are not satisfied, for 
we are sure that this development is unreal, and that he re- 
mains a knave in spite of all. 1 A subjectivity which sets itself 
free from every particular import is in its cycle and degree 
the dissolution of the beautiful, which lies in the concrete 
unity of subject and object, 

(4) As this complete triumph of subjectivity 2 
the comedy of Aristophanes marks the close of one 
period, and the comedy of Shakespeare :j perhaps that of an- 
other. The comic in this pre-eminent sense must be sharply 
distinguished from the laughable. Only that is truly comic, 
in which the persons of the play are comic for themselves as 
well as for the spectator, and so escape all seriousness, bitter- 
ness or disappointment when their futile purposes are des- 
troyed by the means they take to realise them. Comedy 
starts from the absolute reconciliation which is the close of 
tragedy, 4 the absolute self-certainty and cheerfulness which 
nothing can disturb, This is the attribute as of the Aristo- 
phanic persons so of Shakespeare's comic characters, among 
whom Falstaff is " the absolute hero"; 5 a sort of greatness 
runs through them, a freedom and strength of individuality 
and superiority to external failure. Serious modern comedy, 
such as Moliere's Avair, has not this ideal characteristic, and 
therefore tends finally to pass into the prosaic world of the 
ordinary drama, the mere ingenious representation of com- 
monplace intrigue. 

rv. I may conclude in Hegel's words, 6 from the 
nc u 1 n ' last two pages of the /Esthetic lectures : — 
" With the development of comedy we have arrived at the 
close of our scientific discussion. W e began with symbolic 
art, in which subjectivity is struggling to find itself a content 
and form, and to become objective ; we advanced to classical 
art, which sets before itself in living individual shape the sub- 



1 576. Cf. e.g. The Two Gentlemc?i of Verona. 

2 iii- 533- "Whereas in Tragedy the externally valid comes out victorious,, 
stripping off the one-sideness of the individual ... in Comedy, conversely* 
it is subjectivity which in its infinite security keeps the upper hand." This 
form is drawn from Schelling, who defines Comedy as the converse of Tragedy, 
having "necessity in the subject and not in the object." 

3 iii. 579. 4 iii. 557. 5 iii. 207. 6 iii. 579-80. 



CONCLUSION. 



36 [ 



stantive content which has become distinct ; and we ended in 
the romantic art of the heart and the feelings with the absolute 
subjectivity moving freely in itself in the form of mind, which, 
satisfied in itself, no longer unites with the objective and 
particular, but brings into consciousness for itself the negative 
character of this dissolution in the humour of comedy. . Yet 
in this culmination comedy is leading straight to the dissolu- 
tion of art in general. The aim of all art is the identity, 
produced by the mind, in which the eternal and divine, the 
substantively true, is revealed in real appearance and shape 
to our external perception, our feelings and our imagination. 
But if comedy displays this unity only in its self-dissolution, 
inasmuch as the Absolute, endeavouring to produce itself into 
reality, sees this realisation destroyed by interests which have 
obtained freedom in the real world, and are directed only to 
the subjective and accidental, then the presence and activity 
of the Absolute no longer appears in positive union with the 
character and aims of real existence, but exclusively asserts itself 
in the negative form, that it destroys everything which does not 
correspond to it ; and only subjectivity as such displays itself 
in this dissolution as self-confident and self-secure. 1 

"In this way we have now, down to the close, arranged every 
essential principle of beauty and phase of art into a garland of 
philosophy, the binding of which is among the noblest achieve- 
ments that science has in its power to fulfil. For in art we 
have to do with no mere toy of pleasure or of utility, but with 
the liberation of the mind from the content and forms of the 
finite, with the presence and union of the Absolute within the 
sensuous and phenomenal, and with an unfolding of truth 
which is not exhausted in the evolution of nature, but reveals 
itself in the world-history, of which it constitutes the most 
beautiful aspect and the best reward for the hard toil of reality 
and the tedious labours of knowledge. And therefore it was 
impossible that our study should consist in any mere criticism 
of works of art, or suggestions for their production, but it had 



1 See above, p. 354 for a discussion of the idea that Hegel believes art to 
be finally ended, on which the close of the Introduction is a sufficient com- 
mentary. But we must claim extraordinary insight for him, who, still under 
the spell of Schiller and Goethe, described the present exhaustion of the art- 
impulse and the conditions ho:tile to it in language approaching that of Rus- 
kin or William Morris. 



362 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



no other aim than to pursue the fundamental idea of the beau- 
tiful and of art through all the stages which it traverses in its 
realisation, and by means of thought to make them certain 
and intelligible." 



CHAPTER XIII. 



' EXACT /ESTHETIC IN GERMANY. SCHOPENHAUER TO STUMPF. 

Need of Exact i. It is difficult, I said in the last chapter, to get 



-ffistnetic. 



net result out of Hegel ; and strictly speaking, in 
science as science there can be no net result, no conclusion 
detachable from the inferential process. But yet the historico- 
philosophical method, which insists on giving us the whole 
whenever we ask for the minutest part, seems to some minds, 
and in some hands really is, an evasion of direct issues. 
The desire for a plain answer to a plain question found repre- 
sentatives in post- Kantian philosophy, whose importance, 
overshadowed at the time by the very bulk of the Hegelian 
writers, has effectually asserted itself in the period of re- 
action. 

^cnopenbauer 2 * ^ e hiaugurators of this movement were 
Herbart (1776-1841) and Schopenhauer (1788- 
1860). I shall treat of Schopenhauer first, in order to avoid 
interposing an account of him between Herbart and the Her- 
bartians. It may seem strange to class with 44 exact " philoso- 
phers a writer who is prima facie a mystic ; but it must be 
remembered that the root of mysticism is a love of directness 
amounting to impatience, and a repugnance to the circuitous 
approaches of systematic thought. This same characteristic 
may be a defence for the brevity which our treatment will 
display from this point onwards ; for the exact or formal 
thinkers, to whom 011 the whole Schopenhauer belongs, being 
indifferent to content and caring chiefly about given form, are 
able to state their conceptions almost in axiomatic shape, in- 
stead of developing them historically. In the following 
chapter, it may also be remarked, it will be possible to deal 
as briefly with Hegel's principal successors, because in dealing 
with them the mass of his ideas may be presupposed. 

scuopemiauer a *• Schopenhauer is a true post- Kantian both in 
kind of post- his data and in his theory. In addition to the 

Kantian « 

Greek and English culture of the time, he was 



3<H 



HISTORY OF AESTHETIC. 



profoundly influenced by the ancient Indian philosophy, which 
we remember the Romantic teacher, Fr. von Schlegel, did 
much to bring into prominence. 1 The fashionable pessimism 
and mysticism of cultivated Europe owes its origin in a great 
measure to Schopenhauer. 2 

As a theorist, Schopenhauer starts from Kant, whose de- 
marcation of aesthetic he accepts in essentials, and whose 
conception of the thing-in-itself he identified, here following 
suggestions of Fichte and Schelling, 3 with an underlying will, 
as opposed to the "idea" of Hegelianism, which is the unity 
of the world interpreted on the analogy of the intellect. This 
will, as the ultimate reality, is incapable of being the object of 
knowledge ; and becomes such an object, not in itself, but 
only in its " objectifications," which are the external types of 
specific existence, forming a system of grades in the com- 
pleteness with which they represent the will, and identified by 
Schopenhauer with the " Platonic ideas." These ultimate 
typical individualities, for such they are in opposition to the 
concepts of science, are only known as divined by artistic per- 
ception, being self-contained, and satisfactory to the contem- 
plative sense. They are wholly distinct from such notions as 
consist in relations under the law of sufficient reason, which, 
forming an endless chain, forbid the mind to rest in them. 

For our immediate purpose the main interest of Schopen- 
hauer's position is its abstractness, which is complementary to 
the vast historical complexity of Hegelianism. History, for 
him, is unessential to the idea ; 4 only the eternal types which 
are framed within it are able to represent, for example, the 
idea of man. For knowledge of phenomena, the true method 
is that of the "understanding" with its clear relations accord- 
ing to the law of sufficient reason ; for knowledge of reality, the 
visions of art. The moving concrete of "reason" seems non- 
sense to him ; his " ideas " correspond to the fixity of species ; 
in everything he prefers the definite and the permanent. The 



1 By his work, On the Language and Wisdom of the Ancient Hindus, 1813, 
Schopenhauer was personally acquainted with the Orientalist Mayer, and con- 
stantly refers to Duperron's Latin translation of the Upanishads, 1801. See 
art. " Schopenhauer," Encycl. Brit., by W. Wallace. 

2 See e.g. AniiePs Diary, with its constant reference to Maya. 

3 " Will is the ultimate being." Schelling, quoted by Wallace, art. " Schopen- 
hauer," Encycl. Brit. 

4 Will and Idea, vol. i. 236, E. Tr. 



PREFERENCE FOR THE CLASSICAL. 



365 



movement and evolution of things as we know them is part of 
the illusion belonging to our mode of knowledge ; "velle non 
discitur " ; the real underlying character of the universe and of 
each individual is one and unchangeable. He delights in the 
simple rationality of the Greek temple, 1 and cannot appreciate 
Gothic buildings, approval of which, as he very naively says, 
would upset all his theories of the aesthetic purpose of archi- 
tecture. Their interest depends, he thinks, on associated 
ideas ; but these have no place in strict aesthetic judgment. 2 
The distinction between classical and romantic poetry means 
to him that the former deals with natural motives, and the 
latter with artificial ones, 3 specially those of the Christian 
myth, chivalry, and the ridiculous Christo- Germanic woman 
worship. 4 

We shall find this preference for the classical predominate 
among the " exact" thinkers; naturally, as their view is, in 
sum, a recurrence to classical aesthetic, armed with the 
methods of modern science. 

ms account of ii. The beauty of the beautiful, for Schopen- 
a^dits Biodm- hauer, has two sides ; it frees us from the will, 
cations. anc i therefore from the whole apparatus that 
attends our greatest vice and misfortune, the will to live, — from 
explanation, causation, means and ends, purpose, desire ; 5 and 
on the other hand it fills our minds with an 44 idea," an objecti- 
fication of the will at a certain grade which we see in, and as 
the essence of, the merely particular object presented to our 
aesthetic perception. As everything is in some degree an 
objectification of the will, everything is in some degree charac- 
teristic, and in some degree beautiful. 6 There is no further 
difference between art and nature than that in art the artist 
lends us his eyes to look through ; but then his genius can 



1 IVerke, iii. 473 ff. (German). 

2 This view, which Herbart apparently shares ( IV, viii. 12), reveals a tremen- 
dous chasm between these early " exact philosophers " and Mr. Ward, who 
thinks associated ideas one of the most important elements of aesthetic. 
Article " Psychology," Encycl Brit Fechner is with Mr. Ward on this point. 
See p. 384 below. 

3 IVerke, iv. 92. 

4 Hegel considers Schiller's reverence for woman a distinct proof ot his 
insight into the synthesis of sense and reason (sEsth., Introd., E Tr. p. 119). 
This contrast of views is typical. 

5 IV ill, etc., i. 270, E. Tr. 

6 lb., 271. 



3 66 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



understand the half-uttered speech of nature, 1 and so produce 
what she desired to produce, but failed. This understanding 
is possible because of the unity between the will which we 
are, and the will which Nature embodies. Such an under- 
standing or anticipation is the Ideal. 

Ugliness appears to be merely defective manifestation 2 or 
partial objectification of the will, and so, in agreement with 
what was said of beauty, would be merely relative. The sub- 
lime ist he same as the beautiful, except that it presupposes 
a hostile relation between the objects contemplated and the 
individual will, which hostility, being overcome by an effort, 
gives rise to a spiritual exaltation of the subject in attaining, 
by this special effort, the pure contemplation of the idea in the 
hostile object. 3 

The arts are arranged rather according to their object- 
matter than according to their medium, 4, but with regard to 
the determination of the former by the latter, and so very 
much in the order in which Hegel placed them. The fault of 
the latter in looking too exclusively to grades of life as a key 
to the value of the art representing them is paralleled by 
Schopenhauer. The peculiar position of architecture and 
music, however, as not representing any individual objects, 
gives him occasion for a remarkable treatment of both. The 
aim of architecture, which has no characteristic individual idea 
to present, must be, he infers, to put before perception the 
simplest qualities of matter, gravity, cohesion, rigidity, and 
the like. 5 This is why the Gothic concealment of the rela- 
tion between burden and support, which the Greek beam- 
architecture is supposed to display in its nakedness, is incom- 
patible with the aim which he ascribes to the art. Apart from 
its peculiar application, this principle of bringing out the quali- 
ties of a material is one of great importance, and conspicuous 



1 Will., etc., i. 287, E. Tr. 

2 lb., 289. 

3 lb., 260-1. 

4 Schopenhauer's ingenious modification and defence of Goethe's colour- 
theory appears to be in harmony with modern physiological ideas. He inter- 
prets Goethe's account of colour as light mixed with darkness, to mean that 
colour involves a partial activity of the retina (light), and a partial inactivity 
(dark), and lays down the principle that the retina always tends to a complete 
activity, the parts of which, if not simultaneous, as in white light, are successive, 
as in complementary images. See Ueber das Sehen u. d. Farben, Werke, i. 

5 i. 277, E. Tr. 



IMITATIVE MUSIC. 367 



by its absence in almost all other aesthetic philosophers except 
HegeE 

Music, the analogy of which to architecture is very reasonably 
treated, the enormous difference between the two arts being 
duly emphasised, 1 is placed by itself, outside and above the 
series of the other arts. It is not like them, " the copy of the 
ideas, but the copy of the will itself, whose objectivity they 
are." 2 The expression is mystical, as in Schopenhauer's 
whole conception of the will in the universe ; but if we treat 
it as an analogy much may be said in its favour. We saw- 
how strongly both Aristotle and Plato insisted that music was 
the most adequate or only adequate "imitation of life and 
character," or "of moral temperament." We may partly 
justify the extension of the comparison to the will in the 
universe, by Schopenhauer's clear recognition following Leib- 
nitz, of the broad basis of modern music in the necessary 
numerical relations which underlie the region of musical 
sound, 3 but the sense of which acts on the musical conscious- 
ness as the sign only, and not as the thing signified ; and thus - 
we may fairly bring together Schopenhauer's conception of 
music as " the quintessence of life and events, 4 without any 
likeness to any of them," with the theory of Hanslick as modi- 
fied by Lotze, 5 according to w r hich music embodies " the 
general figures and dynamic element of occurrences," con- 
sidered as carrying our feelings with them. This notion has 
a just and important bearing on imitative music in the strict 
sense, which is criticised, in terms of the theory, as addressing 
itself to the intermediate conception of things, the phenomenon 
of the will, and not to the will or underlying reality, or, as we 
might say, to the spirit of life and occurrence itself. " Such 
(imitative) music is entirely to be rejected." 6 This judgment 



1 Schopenhauer comments on the phrase, " frozen music," ascribing it to 
Goethe and not to Schelling. I do not know how the priority stands as 
between them. 

2 i. 353, E. Tr. Readers of Browning will be reminded of Abt Vogler t 
both by the comparison between music and architecture, and by the direct 
assimilation to the will. 

3 Schopenhauer quotes with approval, " Musica est exercitium arithmetical 
occultum nescientis se numerare animi," which Schelling had quoted before 
him, from Leibnitz. Schop., W> i. 331, E. Tr. 

4 i. 339, E. Tr. See App. II. below. 

5 G. d. A., 487. 

6 World as Will and Idea, 341, E. Tr. 



3 68 



HISTORY OF .ESTHETIC. 



repeats that of Plato. The general theory is closely analogous 
to that of Schelling. " Music, as representing pure move- 
ment, is above all others the art which strips off the 
bodily." 1 

criticism of in. Schopenhauer's attitude to concrete Idealism 
scuopenhauer. must not b e judged by his attacks upon Hegel 
and Schelling. His whole doctrine in aesthetic is essentially 
a form of the theory of the characteristic, though always with 
a leaning to the distinct and plainly rational as against the 
suggestive and profoundly emotional. Though sense, as he 
knows quite well, is the organ to which beauty is relative, yet 
he always speaks of aesthetic perception as a form of know- 
ledge distinguished only by being free from will. This defect 
reacts on his system by a certain want of sympathy in the 
treatment of architecture 2 and tragedy, 3 the highest function 
of the latter being necessarily for him negative, to produce 
resignation. Except for this, and an insertion of landscape 
gardening after architecture in the series of arts, Schopenhauer 
is in the substance of his views a very fair representative of 
post- Kantian aesthetic, while in literary form he is facile pi'in- 
ccps among German philosophers. Such a doctrine as Hegel's 
opposition between true and false infinity is far more easily 
approached by the non-philosophical reader through Schopen- 
hauer's contrast between the aesthetic object and the object of 
theoretical knowledge. 

But if the main element in his account of music was after all 
a mystical conception, for a blind will is perhaps even harder 
to bring together with the unity of the world than an active 
unconscious idea, he nevertheless justified at least the place 
which Hegel assigned to music as the central romantic art, 
and impressed upon the philosophical and the musical world, 
in telling language, the problem of its mysterious powers. 

V It will be remembered that the object of 

Herbert. . . . 

aesthetic judgment first presented itself to Kant 
as "form," and that the symbolic or significant nature of this 
" form" only pressed itself upon him as his inquiries continued, 
and subject to some doubt whether "significance" as such 
was not extra-aesthetic. 



1 Schelling, /F., v. 50 t. 2 See above, p. 365. 

3 The motives of the Antigone and Philoctetes are " Widerwartige oder 
gar ekelhafte." JK, in. 437 (German). 



ELEMEN TARY RE LATIONS. 



369 



„. „ i. In attachment to the idea of pure form, and 

His Formalism . . L 

andits agreeing with bchopenhauer 111 a strong antagon- 

Consequences. j gm tQ ^ histOriCO-philosophic school, HERBART 

took his own way of vindicating the objective validity of the 
aesthetic judgment. 1 Like Kant, he considers this judgment 
essentially individual, on the ground that abstract universality 
is incompatible with the complete presentation of the form 
submitted to judgment. And again like Kant, in fact though 
not in words, he ascribes to this judgment objective validity 
because of its permanent truth about the same object 2 under 
the same conditions. For modern logic such an ''individual" 
judgment is plainly universal. 3 

The pure form, then, with reference to which objective 
individual judgments are made, consists, in his view, of rela- 
tions and nothing but relations, simply as presented, and 
wholly dissociated from context. These are the ''aesthetic 
elementary relations," and the enumeration of these is the task 
of aesthetic science. We are startled to find that among such 
relations those of will to will are included, so that ethics 
becomes a branch of aesthetic. This does not, however, in- 
volve confusing the act of will with the aesthetic judgment. 
The good implies both these conditions ; the beautiful, only 
one of them. 4 

The first immediate consequence of this view is a protest 
against the generalising predicates such as " pathetic, noble, 
pretty, solemn," and the like, drawn from species of subjective 
emotion, which find a place in common aesthetic. They have 
not only the fault of subjectivity, but also that of abstractness. 
They tell us nothing of the special beauty and ugliness in 
particular arts ; nothing in music, where the question is of 
tone ; nothing in sculpture, where the question is of contours. 0 
And so Herbart is with some justice hard upon writers like 
Schelling, who find in every art the excellence of some other, 
and not its own. The real type of the relations which he 
desires to discover and enumerate is in the relations of har- 
mony between musical notes. These, he said in a foot-note 



1 Zimmermann, A., i. 773. Herbart, IV., viii. 27. 

2 Logically "subject"" ; Herbart is contrasting it with the subject as 
percipient. 

3 See p. 341 supra, on Idealisation. 
* W., ii. 74. 

5 IK, i. 130. 

B B 



37o 



HISTORY OF AESTHETIC. 



which was afterwards modified, perhaps as too rashly candid, 
were the only aesthetic elements which had for centuries been 
determined and recognised with almost complete certainty. 1 
He only aims at simple forms, " elements;" no clear and 
unambiguous judgment can be passed upon a highly complex 
work of art or nature. The combination of the elements 
belongs to the doctrine of art. 

The second immediate consequence of his view is that the 
simple has no aesthetic quality, 2 and according to Zimmer- 
man n 3 he even pushes this conclusion against the beauty of 
tones and colours perceived in isolation. It is so obvious that 
no presentation is really simple (extension in space or time 
sufficing to render it complex) that to decide this vexed ques- 
tion, which has already been touched upon more than once, 4 
on such a ground, seems extraordinarily naive. And there are 
deeper reasons for questioning the rightness of the conclusion, 
even if we take tone and colour as approaching simplicity. 

Herbart did not carry out systematic researches in aesthetic, 
k is worth while, however, to take note of some of his most 
suggestive remarks, 
ms Division His primary division of aesthetic elementary 

of relations is that between the simultaneous and 

Esthetic Relations. * . , n 1 r r j 

the successive ; but all the arts, he finds, par- 
ticipate in both. The effect of the predominance of succession 
on poetry is worked out in a way that reminds us of the 
Laocoon. 5 But in poetry the simple relations are difficult to 
state owing to the lapse of time between their terms. In 
tones and colours it is easier, and there should be a science of 
colour harmony like that of harmony in music. 6 An exceed- 
ingly instructive example of Herbart's views is given at this 
point in- an answer to the objection, ''the importance of which 
is derived only from its audacity," that the numerical relations 
which underlie the relation of harmonising tones are not the 
elements of positive beauty in music, and but for the com- 
poser's genius, which gives them soul and significance, might 



1 IV., i., 150, note, withdrawn after 3rd edition. General-bass (Thorough- 
bass) he considers a part of aesthetic. Z, i. 770. 
3 W„ i. 137. 

3 1. 791- 

4 In treating of Plato, Kant, and Hegel. 

5 TV., i. 149-50. 

6 lb. This natural idea cannot be pressed. See below on Zimmermann. 



SYMMETRY. 



37i 



produce mere monotony. " This soul and significance," he 
replies, " may be great with great artists, and little with little 
ones ; in any case we must abstract from it here, for we are 
speaking of the elements, and of the degree of accuracy 
with which they are determined. The mind of the artist can 
make no change in this." In an earlier edition he had written, 
"Then harmony would have to be banished from aesthetic." 1 
This conception of aesthetic seems to give up the game, so far 
as a complete explanation of concrete beauty is concerned. 

The harmonious in tones and colours depends on "blending 
before inhibition " 2 which must mean much the same as the 
capacity of forming parts in a whole. The account of sym- 
metry gives no special importance to the curves of varying 
curvature, and even appears to say that the circle 3 is a pre- 
dominant form in flower-contours, which shows very defective 
aesthetic observation. Yet there is a profound suggestion in 
the same passage as to the deeper equilibrium which replaces 
symmetry in the forms of plants and in landscapes, as depend- 
ing on the balance demanded by perception, at present, 
Herbart says, inadequately understood. The limited concep- 
tion of curve-beauty 4 is characteristic of Herbart's view, which 
prefers in everything the finite and complete. But yet he is 
led to the suggestive remark that if there is a general formula 
of beauty, it is "to lose something of regularity, in order at 
once to regain it," 5 i.e. apparently to suggest the rule by 
deviations from it — an elementary case of progress accompanied 
by negation. 

classification of hi- Herbart's classification of the arts does not 
tueArts. rest U p 0n t] le above principles of the simultaneous 
and successive, but on a distinction which is intended to cor- 
respond to that between classical and romantic art, or as 
Zimmermann subsequently called it, art of complete and of 
incomplete presentation. The arrangement 6 is as follows : — 

Architecture. Landscape Gardening. 

Sculpture. Painting. 

1 W.j i. 151 and footnote. 

2 "Verschmelzung vor der Hemmung." lb. 

3 Can " die Kreisform " be a general term for "curves " ? 

4 It may be objected to my criticism that the higher curve-beauty would 
not belong to Symmetry. But I do not find it treated elsewhere in Herbart. 

5 W. t i. 155. 
« lb., 171. 



3/2 



HISTORY OF AESTHETIC. 



Church Music. " Entertaining " Music. 

Classical Poetry. Romantic Poetry. 

The one group is supposed to consist of arts that "can be 
looked at on all sides " (like sculpture), the others keeping 
in a soft twilight and admitting of no complete critical ex- 
ploration. The distinction as applied to music has of course 
met with adverse criticism, appearing to omit, for example, the 
orchestral symphony. The root of it is probably to be found 
in the passage on harmony above alluded to, where the foot- 
note goes on to argue that the beauty of " chorales" depends 
almost entirely on harmony, and therefore, it would follow, is 
readily deducible from the aesthetic elementary relations con- 
stituted by the laws of harmony. In commenting on the 
classification, Herbart seems to imply that only those who 
wish art to express something will care for the arts of the 
second group, and that their charm really rests on extra- 
aesthetic attractions, 
criticism and iv. It Is no objection to Herbart's theory that 

Estimate. j t proposes to deal at first only with simple cases 
of beauty. To analyse what lends itself to analysis is the 
first rule of science, and the importance which he attaches to 
the numerical and physical basis of harmony is not exagger- 
ated. A real objection might arise if it were seriously main- 
tained that the beauty of more complex shapes in nature and 
art could be dealt with as a mere combination of the beauties 
of elementary forms. This would be, for instance, to treat the 
human figure as a decorative element. The crux of true 
aesthetic is to show how the combination of decorative forms 
in characteristic presentations, by an intensification of the 
essential character immanent in them from the beginning, 
subjects them to a central significance which stands to their 
complex combination as their abstract significance stood to 
them in isolation. But this objection comes later. Every one 
must welcome the plain statement of simple problems which 
concern the point where meaning passes into shape, and the 
attempt to deal with the pleasantness of perceptive states qua 
perceptive, as consisting of reactions and combinations having 
their own psychical effects qua reactions and combinations. 
Therefore the theory of formalism was practically opportune. 

On the theory of the theory, so to speak, there is more to 
be said. 



BEAUTY IN RELATIONS. 



373 



Prima facie, if we are to start from the given in aesthetic 
perception, it would seem that we cannot start from relations. 
Beauty as perceived lies rather in qualities than in relations, 
and a relation as such can only exist for discursive thought, 
which is not compatible with aesthetic perception. The point, 
then, of the very relations into which the formalist analyses the 
simpler cases of beauty seems to lie not in their satisfactoriness 
to perception, but in their satisfactoriness to the intellectual 
craving for explanation. As numerical or geometrical relations, 
apart from sense-presentation, one is in no way preferable to 
another. Considered, therefore, as an analysis of the actual 
perception of beauty, the reduction to relations is the assign- 
ment of a very simple import or significance to such percep- 
tions, and there is no reason on the same principle for not 
going the whole length and finding in them the symbols of 
character or of moral law, just as much as symbols of numeri- 
cal or symmetrical relation. And in fact, conformably to what 
was said of the limitations of classical aesthetic, the recogni- 
tion of a deeper import makes the actual analysis of expressive 
elements far more subtle, and therefore more complete within 
the bounds of formalism, than that which only looks for formal 
relations. Let any reader compare with Herbart or Zimmer- 
mann on symmetry, repetition and curvature, either Hegel's 
treatment of the same subjects in the section on the beauty of 
nature, or Ruskin's in the last chapter of Elements of Draw 
ingy and he will see the difference between formalism within 
idealism, which has plenty of room for it, and formalism which 
pretends to exclude all idealism. Yet Ruskin himself finds 
elements in beauty which he can make no attempt to explain, 1 
and it is well that there should be exact analysts who urge us 
to state or describe these given ultimate elements, and in every 
case to begin research by definitely enumerating the most 
direct and tangible cases of the phenomenon to be explored. 

4. Zimmermann, 2 a professor at the university 

Ziminarrnaim. r , . 1 • 1 1 a • r 

01 rrague, who with the Austrian professors went 
over to the school of Herbart, 3 has been criticised at a great 
length and with extreme severity by Hartmann, 4 and also by 



1 Elements of Dj-awing, p. 322, and Mod. P., vol. i. p. 25, and iii. 160 ff. 

2 Author of Geschichte d. sEsthetic, 1858. Allgemcine /Esth., 1865. 

3 Erdmann, Hist, of Phil., iii. 33, E. Tr. 

4 /Esth., i. 269 ff. 



374 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



Vischer 1 in a rejoinder to Zimmermann's attack on Vischer's 
great work. 

It would not be diffcult, following the line taken by these 
critics and indicated in my observations on Herbart, to con- 
vict Zimmermann's formalism of abstractness where it is pure, 
and of inconsistency where it appeals to content. But we shall 
find it more profitable to consider what fruitful ideas are repre- 
sented in aesthetic by this movement (in which Zimmermann 
attaches himself so closely to Herbart that, while greatly de- 
veloped, his thoughts cannot be readily distinguished from 
those of the latter), which though giving an impression of 
perversity and eccentricity, may yet be seen to rest on a defi- 
nite conception that has a solid foundation. 

The Distinctive u ^ cannot indeed be reasonably maintained, 
Nature of in view of the elaborate treatment devoted by such 

0 e 1 'a thinker as Hegel to mathematical, chromatic and 

musical beauty, that idealism as such neglects the plain fact 
that all beauty exists in and for sense-perception or fancy. But 
yet it might be urged with truth that there has been, as was 
admitted in the first chapter of the present work, a solution of 
continuity at one point of the objective analysis. By what 
mechanism, or under what particular necessity, do sensuous 
forms which are highly and harmoniously expressive, give 
pleasure to the percipient owing to that expressiveness? The 
idealist relies mainly on a concrete analysis of what is recog- 
nised as beautiful. He does not aspire to legislate, but only 
to explain. He can show that where, and in as far as, the 
trained perception is pleased, the presentation which pleases 
is one that has, as we say, "something in it." He may in pro- 
portion to his knowledge and his critical acuteness, pursue his 
researches into every detail of the sensuous semblance, as for 
instance into its geometrical properties, and prove that, in 
comparison with a less beautiful perception, it either reveals a 
deeper idea, or exhibits its idea more adequately to sense. 
If, however, we ask how to demonstrate that beauty must be 
pleasant, his answer will be less ready, for the great idealists 
have dealt but little with the exact psychology 2 of ideas in 
interaction. 

1 Kritische G tinge, no. 6. 

2 I must not be understood to admit that they have not dealt with psychology 
at all. I should doubt whether any other writer has approached Hegel's 
Philosophy of Mind, as a study of the phases of subjectivity. 



TENSIONS BETWEEN IDEAS. 



375 



The idealist will reply, and rightly, that all self-manifesta- 
tion, with its weaker phase self-recognition, is naturally 
pleasant. But he might hardly be able to show by what 
mechanism pleasure is annexed to the contemplation of a 
symmetrical pattern, or a harmonious arrangement of colour, 
or to the hearing of a musical chord. And in popular criti- 
cism this difficulty sometimes amounts to a formidable contra- 
diction. " The drawing is incorrect, but full of feeling." 
M The performance (musical) was inaccurate, but full of fire." 
In each of these judgments the two predicates are not in pari 
materia. The first predicate refers to form, the second to 
content. But the quality indicated by the second must be 
conveyed to eye or ear through positive form — through a 
definite operation of mechanical means — no less than the first. 
Through what form is it conveyed ? The popular mind 
drops the analysis as soon as it presents some difficulty, and 
consequently commits itself to an absolutely fatal antithesis. 
I do not say that formalistic aesthetic has very much better 
success in practice, its cruces arising, as Herbart admitted 1 
and as the critics insist, just where the deeper qualities begin. 
But it is something that we should be kept in mind of the 
problem. 

Now this the formalist, and especially the Herbartian 
formalist, will do for us. He begins by pointing out that 
in the current of our ideas there are excited certain pleasures 
and pains by the mere operation of ideas upon one another 
in respect of their identity or opposition, and their conse- 
quent tendency to reinforce or depress one another. If these 
relations of pleasure and the reverse can be worked out in 
any degree of detail so as to coincide with the phenomena 
of aesthetic pleasantness, the result would be a definition of 
aesthetic pleasure, not merely de facto as the pleasure of 
expressive presentations, but de jure as the pleasure produced 
by certain tensions, depressions and excitations arising in the 
course of ideas, definable without going beyond the course 
of ideas itself. 

Zimmermann's attempt £o discover the fundamental forms 
which, in the coexistence of ideas, give rise to pleasure and 
the reverse, and to apply them to the determination of beauty 
in nature and in art, is admittedly not as successful as its 



1 P. 371 supra. 



376 



HISTORY OF /ESTHETIC. 



conception was opportune. But it is desirable to make our- 
selves acquainted with its general nature. 
Meaning of tue 1L All turns on the " Together," the "Zusarri- 

" Together." men " { n Herbart's phrase which is adopted by 
Zimmermann. Simple images carry with them an addition 
(Zusatz) of feeling, but this fuses itself with them and is in its 
nature unsesthetic, because it hinders the distinct perception 
of that which rouses the feeling. 1 The addition which arises 
when two or more images 2 are brought " together" is differ- 
ent in this respect. It is distinguishable from the relation 
perceived, without being removable from it, and consists in a 
feeling of pleasure or otherwise which simply is the tension :i 
between the parts of the compound image. It, the tension 
felt as pleasure or otherwise, is therefore the aesthetic judg- 
ment, which is thus identical and self-evident. 

The complex image is not a sum of lifeless parts. It is a 
psychical group of ideas, whose parts are ideas which are 
living forces, and their "Together" is vital and active, pro- 
ducing tension and relaxation of them against and among 
each other. 4 These inter-relations are therefore essentially 
active and actual ; they are not mere mathematical relations 
and cannot be concentrated into an exponent. 5 

Now, of course, what sounds or colours are harmonious or 
not, is decided by the ear and eye. But for what reason in 
general anything pleases or displeases, that is, as only forms 
please or displease, by what kind of forms anything, what- 
ever it be, pleases or displeases, this can be decided neither 
by the eye, nor by the ear, nor at all by experience, but only 
by thought. For, for this purpose we need the question, 
what forms, that is, what kind of "together" between the 
perceptions (whatever they may be perceptions of) are, gener- 
ally, possible ; and this question we can decide without first 
considering the specific nature of the content, of the per- 



1 4-> *5- 

2 I desire to avoid interrupting this account with comment, so I simply 
draw the reader's attention to this absolute opposition of simple and com- 
pound. Where the simple is to be found, and how a presentation is to be 
broken up into definite related parts, seems an ultimate difficulty of the view 
before us. 

3 A., 24. 

4 lb., 26. 

5 lb., 27. 



THE ELEMENTARY FORMS. 37 J 



ceptions (or "ideas") which arc in the "together," as given, 
in sound to the ear, and in colour-sensation to the eye. ik The 
'conception of psychical ideas which possess a content {Quality) 
and a definite energy [Quantity) is sufficient for this purpose. 

" ^Esthetic, as it has to do with those forms only by which 
every matter pleases or displeases, if only it is homogeneous, 
i.e. capable of entering into forms at all, is therefore not an 
empirical but an a priori science." 2 

Elementary and m - Thus the science is built up deductively, 
simple Forms, beginning with the elementary or simple forms of 
" Together" — those which involve two terms only — and pro- 
ceeding to the derivative or complex forms, which involve 
more terms than two, and can always be analysed into the 
simple forms. 3 

Beginning with two terms only, and regarding them accord- 
ing to quantity and quality only (disparate terms being in- 
capable of entering into aesthetic form), he finds that in 
quantity they can be compared only as more or less intense, 
and formulates the " pure form of Quantity." " The stronger 
idea is pleasing compared with the weaker ; the weaker is 
unpleasing compared with the stronger." 4 In Quality the 
only cases which do not reduce the two terms to one are those 
of predominant identity and predominant discrepancy. These 
give rise to the harmonious and the unharmonious forms of 
Quality. 5 

These original forms are further subdivided into their 
several cases or applications, and these are then made the 
basis of the derivative forms, being the same principles in 
application to a number of terms greater than two in each 
case. 

The original principle of Quantity (I take this case as an 
illustration) divides genuinely into the forms of the great, 
which rests on comparison of definite large and definite small, 
and the perfect, in which the greater is considered as the pur- 
pose of the less. 6 This is a category of Herbart's aesthetical 
ethic, which Zimmermann introduces into aesthetic proper. 
Spuriously, further, the form of Quantity gives rise to the 
sublime, when the aspiration after an infinite quantity, which 
cannot really be presented in idea, is compared w T ith a definite 



1 A., 37- 
4 /*,3i. 



2 IK 42-3- 
5 lb. 



3 lb., 41. 
0 P. 35- 



373 



HISTORY OF /ESTHETIC. 



quantity. The qualitative difference between an aspiration 
and a quantity is thus taken account of, and the sublime 
falls outside pure quantity and complete conception, and be- 
comes one of the twilight or romantic conceptions. 

In the "harmonious form of Quality," 1 the pleasure which 
harmony produces is ascribed to the predominant identity of 
the qualities of the terms, and confirmation is claimed for the 
view on the ground of Helmholtz's researches. My reason 
for mentioning this particular instance, in which probably the 
theory is seen at its best, is that the good fortune which has 
attended the explanation of musical consonance by the ratio 
between periods of oscillation, has made Zimmermann very 
eager to extend a similar proceeding to the explanation of 
colour harmony. But there is no real correspondence between 
the two cases. It is very doubtful whether complementary 
colours are to a cultivated sense those that naturally har- 
monise. 2 If they were so, then the explanation by blending 
of the identical would be false, for true complementary colours 
share absolutely no element of light 3 with each other. And 
the eye is absolutely incapable of detecting the elements of a 
compound colour, and being pleased or the reverse in conse- 
quence of their ratios of oscillation. 1 No one knew, before it 
was experimentally determined, that yellow was a combination 
of red and green. Every one believed that green was a com- 
bination of blue and yellow. Thus it is fairly certain that no 
form of the numerical analysis which accounts for musical har- 
mony will also account for colour harmony. ^Esthetic judg- 
ment appears, in the above case of red and blue, to be dis- 
torted by the desire to find demonstrable " relations " in the 
colour scale. If such relations exist, they are not parallel to 
those of sound. 

The general theory as applied to these cases is expressed 
as follows. "The identical element in the content of the two 
terms of the form, will seek to produce blending; the opposed 



1 A., 42. 

2 Cf. Z. A., 250, on "red and blue," which he condemns as "peasant's 
fashion," because not complementer)', with Ward in Encycl. Brit., art. 
" Psychology," p. 69, where this combination is explained as belonging to a 
more refined taste than that which enjoys red and green. 

3 Disregarding the mere impurity of ordinary, coloured light, on which 
Zimmermann is ultimately driven to base his theory. A., 43, note. 

4 Helmholtz's Lectures, First Series, E. Tr., p. 92. 



THE SIMPLEST .ESTHETIC QUALITY. 



379 



elements to produce inhibition. The former, which would 
naturally take place in consequence of the partial identity of 
the qualities, is hindered by the latter, which keeps the mem- 
bers of the form apart. The opposition sets up tension 
between the terms which the identity is attempting to unite. 
Through this there arises a state like that of the question. 
If then the identity of the members prevails, this tension is 
relaxed : the opposition that causes it is overcome without 
being abolished ; blending takes place, and with it a feeling of 
pleasure." 1 

One more very simple example in which Zimmermann ap- 
plies his views ought in justice to be mentioned, for it has, I 
think, considerable interest. Building up the work of art from 
its simplest elements, Zimmermann starts with the Imagination 
of abstract Synthesis. 2 A point in space, he here explains, is 
simple, and so without aesthetic quality. Two points, even, 
have no aesthetic relation, being strictly undistinguishable. 
And because they are without aesthetic relation, so is the dis- 
tance between them. (I should have thought, that on Zimmer- 
mann's principles, this was because qua distance it is simple.) 
If two such distances (systems of two points) are presented, 
an aesthetic relation arises. Assuming them to be unequal, 
then according to the form of quantity the greater is pleasing, 
the lesser unpleasing. Hartmann objects to this form that 
it makes the aesthetic judgment, upon the presentation as 
a whole, self-contradictory. But the fact is, I think, well 
observed, and the contradiction, as I understand, is Zimmer- 
mann' s postulate. For he continues by pointing out that if 
there is a common measure (I presume "to perception" 
should be added), the discord is reconciled and the case of 
agreement sets in, accompanied with pleasure. If the dis- 
tances are incommensurable, the percipient is stimulated to 
supply a distance that will harmonise them ; and in the 
"metrical " beauty — beauty of pure measurement — so arising, 
there is the semblance of disproportion overcome by the ulti- 
mate perception of proportion. Thus there is. he would. I 
imagine, desire us to infer, a sense of economy or simplifica- 



1 A., 43-4- 

2 P. iSS. I take this to be the meaning of his " Zusamnienfassendes ^ or- 
stellen," which is a first stage followed by " Empfindendes Vorstellen " and 
"Gedanken Yorstellen." 



HISTORY OF /ESTHETIC. 



tion against waste and destruction, that is to say, combined 
with enlargement of the field of consciousness. 

iv. In the end, all these principles of pure form 
Meaning ofThe within the course of ideas appear to be cases of 
T £Jvai^ d a sort °f rat i° between attention, which is a 
quantity that has a limit, and the field of con- 
sciousness. Ideas or images accompanied by adequate atten- 
tion are, it is suggested, 1 always pleasant. Enlargement of 
the field of consciousness, therefore, is as such accompanied 
with pleasure, so long as it is compatible with adequate atten- 
tion. Economy of attention is pleasant as instrumental to 
adequacy. Interruption or baffling of attention is relatively a 
narrowing of the field of consciousness, and is felt as tending 
to inadequacy of attention. Such waste of attention by inter- 
ruption and baffling is felt for example in dissonance. The 
confusion of a discord is compared to ' k trying to reckon up a 
sum in one's head, and failing because the numbers are too 
high." 2 All mere interruption is painful in itself. Flickering 
lights, meaningless noises, false rhythms, 3 intermittent irrita- 
tions of the skin, are analogous examples. 4 Clearness, truth in 
rhythm, in short, simplification, are economical of attention 
and so pleasant in themselves. 

It is obvious that in this doctrine of pleasantness, which as 
determined by the pure inter-relation of images is, as far as it 
goes, aesthetic pleasantness, we have a counterpart to the 
principle of unity in variety as applied by objective analysis 
to nature and art. Could the formalistic doctrine be elabora- 
ted in detail for the other departments of aesthetic, as it has 
been in the prerogative example of musical consonance and 
dissonance, we should obtain as a result a complete translation 
of objective aesthetic into terms of the course of ideas with its 
pleasantness and unpleasantness, just as we have, in recent 
psychology, important rudiments of such a translation for 
logic and for ethics in the theory of apperceptive masses 
guiding both the unpractical and the practical course of the 
mind. It seems natural, however, that this very abstract 



1 By J. Ward, " Psychology,'" in Encyd. Brit. I have attempted to throw 
together the explanation of pleasantness due to intensity and to quality. 
~ Preyer, quoted by Ward, I.e. 

3 " I would rather go to the treadmill for an hour than walk a mile between 
two asynchronous bipeds." — Henniker's Trifles for Travellers. 

4 Ward, I.e., and Helmholtz, Lectures, Series i. p. 88. 



VALUE OF SIMPLE CASES. 



381 



kind of explanation (abstract, because dealing merely with 
identity and contrast as such) should continue to be most 
effective within the limits which Herbart assigned it, 1 and 
should give way to more worldly language when we come to 
analyse the individual shapes in which aesthetic unity embodie 
itself. Zimmermann manages to deduce a "form of the char- 
acteristic " from his abstract principles, but being a relation 
of identity between archetype and copy, it is not convincing as 
applied within the course of ideas. 

But it is very much to have a clear explanation of simple 
extreme cases ; in such explanation almost every science finds 
its strictest demonstrative support, and to feel the whole value 
of a really definite formal aesthetic it is only necessary to 
read Plato's statement 2 of the true problem of harmonic 
theory in connection with the discoveries of the " Tonempfind- 

ij 

Fecimer 5* ^ we are to be m earnest with formal 
aesthetic, it is plainly necessary to take steps for 
testing the actual agreeableness of various isolated forms to 
unbiassed taste. To have attempted this task by systematic 
experiment is the merit of Fechner, 3 whose researches, al- 
though including valuable enquiries into the beauty of associa- 
tion, display on the whole a decidedly formalistic bent, 
criticism of Pre- i. He prefaces the account 4 of his own experi- 
vious inquiries. men t s w i tn geometrical form by referring to the 
ideas of previous enquirers, upon which he passes two notice- 
able criticisms. First, he observes, nearly all of them aim at 
establishing some one normal form or relation as par excellence 
that of beauty, whereas in fact each of these has value only 
within certain limits, and there is no such thing as a normal 
line or shape of beauty. Secondly, it has been the rule by 
way of obtaining the pure form to omit all reference to asso- 
ciation, which is really a much more important element of the 



1 See p. 371 supra. 

2 Rep. 531 C. "To consider what numbers are harmonious, and what are 
not so, and for what reason in each case." Plato is demanding the real 
reason, as opposed to the empirical observation of consonance. He is fully 
in the spirit of modern science, although of course he did not know where to 
look for his reason. 

3 The well-known writer on " Psychophysics." His principal work bearing 
on Esthetic is Vorschule d. .Esthetik, 1876. 

4 Vorsch. d. A., i. 184. 



3^ 



HISTORY OF /ESTHETIC. 



beautiful than the pure form itself. Among the forms of beauty- 
suggested by previous enquirers, he enumerates the circle 
as handed down from antiquity, the ellipse as advocated by 
Winckelmann, the undulating and spiral lines and the pyra- 
midal shape insisted on by Hogarth ; the square, and in 
general the relation i to i, preferred by recent German 
writers as the most readily comprehensible and therefore the 
most aesthetically advantageous relation ; the simple rational 
relations generally (i to J, i to 2, etc.) on the same ground ; 
and finally Zeising's golden section, propounded by him, not 
merely as a normal aesthetic relation, but as a proportion pre- 
dominant throughout the whole of nature and art. 1 
Experiments with h- One set of Fechner's experiments may be 
Rectangles, etc. briefly described to show the kind of observations 
made and results attained. He asked 2 for judgments of dis- 
tinct preference and rejection from a large number of different 
persons upon the satisfactoriness, elegance, or beauty of ten 
rectangles of equal area, cut out in white card and laid unsorted 
on a black surface. They varied in shape from a square to 
a figure with sides as 2:5, the golden-section rectangle with 
its sides as 21 : 34 being seventh in order of length, count- 
ing from the square. Generally speaking, the judgments 
of preference increased and the judgments of rejection dimin- 
ished from the two extremes (square 3 and longest rectangle) 
to the golden-section rectangle, which had 35 per cent, 
of the preferences, and absolutely no rejections. It w T ould 
have been interesting to try a differently framed series. I 
should suggest a tendency to prefer a form that was not 
extreme in the given series. 

Most of the persons began by saying that it all depended 
on the application to be made of the figure, and on being told 
to disregard this, showed much hesitation in choosing. 

Fechner's general results with regard to these figures and 
to the division of straight lines into segments, are that the 
square 4 and the rectangle nearest to it on the one hand, and 



1 Cf. p. 41 above. The proportion in question, it will be remembered, is 
that in which the lesser is to the greater as the greater to the sum of the two. 
It is applied by Zeising to any two principal dimensions in a figure. 

2 V. d. A., i. 192 and 195. 

3 The square, however, had a few more preferences than the rectangle next 
to it. The longest rectangle had no such preference over its neighbour. 

4 See note \ 



THE PREFERABLE RECTANGLE. 



383 



the longest rectangle on the other hand, are the least pleasing. 
The simple rational relations (corresponding, it has been sug- 
gested, to musical consonance) show absolutely no superior 
pleasantness to those which can only be expressed by ratios 
of much larger numbers (corresponding to dissonance). The 
golden-section rectangle, and its immediate neighbours have 
a real superiority in pleasantness to the other rectangles. The 
least deviation from symmetry has a far more decided un- 
pleasantness than a proportionally much greater deviation 
from the golden section. 

In dividing a horizontal line, the golden section is decidedly 
less pleasant than bisection. 1 In dividing a vertical figure, 
say in determining the point of insertion of the arm of a cross, 
the golden section is less pleasant than the ratio of 1 : 2. 

These results, together with the uncertainty of judgment 
shown by those who contributed to them, support the general 
view which I have taken of formal beauty. Doubtless some 
slight but definite reason exists for the preference thus displayed 
as between certain figures, but conformably to the slightness of 
the content which such bare forms can symbolise, it is readily- 
overcome by any concrete application of them. Thus in the 
measurements of picture frames, there is customarily a wide 
deviation from the golden section, and the customary ratio 
between height and breadth is different according as the 
height exceeds the breadth, or the breadth exceeds the 
height. 2 This shows the overpowering influence of the con- 
crete upon the abstract. For sheer abstract figures, height 
and breadth have no meaning. 

The slight exceptional rise of preference for the square 
seems quite intelligible, owing to the unique character im- 
pressed upon this figure by the total absence of difference 
between its sides. Mere uniqueness, incapability of being" 
confused with anything else, is attractive per sc. Simplicity, 
stability, and many such properties naturally connect them- 
selves, and have always been felt to do so, with this same 
absence of difference in the dimensions of this figure. 3 At 



1 See on Zimmermann, p. 379 above. 

2 V. d. A., ii. 292, If height is greater, it is to breadth as 5 : 4 j if 
breadth, it is to height as 4 : 3 ; i.e. there is a feeling against excess of 
height, probably not hard to explain. 

3 rerpdyojvos avev if/6yov. " Foursquare without blame," of the good man in 
Ar. Ethics ) i. 10, 11. 



3H 



HISTORY OF /ESTHETIC 



the same time difference has its attractions ; but plainly must 
go far enough to escape confusion with the square, and attain 
some sort of balance (the grounds of which I do not profess 
myself able to suggest) before it can surpass the pleasantness 
of the simple unity of the square. 

luetic Laws. Fechner's aesthetic laws, with the excep- 

tion of the law of association and perhaps of the 
law of economy, are very much the laws of Greek aesthetic. 
Such are the law of unity in variety, of congruousness, of 
clearness. 

But newer ground is opened up by his treatment of the 
principle of association 1 and of the law of economy. 

In speaking of Herbart, we saw reason to suspect that in 
ascribing the pleasantness of presented qualities to their 
dependence on abstract relations, the narrow paths of strict 
formalism had already been abandoned. For if we once go 
behind the sensuous presentation, are we not in fact looking 
for a reason ? What indeed is a ratio, for the perception of 
beauty, if it is not a reason ? Granted that smoothness of 
the course of our ideas, and its reverse, may attach to such 
relations, may not other less abstract and more controlling 
properties attach to them as well ? If we assume that this 
criticism is just, it follows that even in exact enquiry the 
candid course is to admit that w T e are looking not only for an 
actual cause of pleasure, but for a reason in the cause, while 
we retain the spirit of H formalism " so far as to insist that no 
reason shall be relevant but one which is inherent in, and not 
casually annexed to, the sense-presentation. 2 Schopenhauer 
and Herbart were right in being suspicious of association ; for 
association may be taken to mean arbitrary or chance con- 
nection. Mr. Ruskin's treatment of the pathetic fallacy 3 is an 
invaluable analysis of the dangers of ungrounded association. 

But yet, those who do not admit that any elements of the 
universe are " cut off with an axe " from the rest, may fairly 
approve of an enquiry into the inherent aesthetic associations 
of given forms ; and if the phrase which I have used is held 
to be a contradiction in terms, then the part of it which we 



1 A., i. 93- 

2 This is in the main Herbart's attitude to association ; see Fechner's Criti- 
cism, A., i. 119. 

3 M P., iii. 157, 173. 



COLOUR-ASSOCIATIONS. 



385 



must retain is the limitation " inherent," and the term " asso- 
ciation " must be replaced by " significance" or " symbolism." 
It is prima facie a reasonable extension of formalism to ask 
what sort of content this or the other form is by its essential 
constitution adapted to express. 

Fechner has boldly attacked the most difficult because least 
analysable of all aesthetic problems, that of the import or 
"associations" of the isolated colours. 1 His execution of the 
attempt does not seem equal to his conception of it. He relies 
almost wholly on the distribution of colours in nature. But 
plausible as it may seem to associate our feeling for red with the 
ideas of blood and fire, or our feeling for blue with the idea of 
the sky, I have serious doubts whether their association ought 
really to be treated as essential. It must be clearly under- 
stood that in any decoration which definitely recalls the forms 
of plants there is more to be considered than the association 
of colours as such. I do not say that we should not be 
shocked if a plant were presented in decoration with red 
leaves and green petals ; but yet the colours even of plants 
are very freely treated for decorative purposes, and we have 
not the least dislike to a plant form depicted entirely in shades 
of red. A fortioi'i the colour in itself, when no natural form 
is portrayed, and the colour harmonies, certainly seem to be 
independent of naturalistic association ; and probably some 
investigations on the older lines, referring to purity or other 
actual properties of the hue as affecting the eye, not neglect- 
ing its implied harmonious or inharmonious relation to our 
ordinary surroundings, would have better success than the 
mere reference to natural associations. It may be pointed out 
as supporting this view, that a very slight difference of shade 
and of gradation throws association wholly off the track. The 
colour of a very hot fire has nothing that reminds us of blood- 
red, and I do not believe that a house door painted with the 
green of the first spring leaves would have any kind of asso- 
ciation with the beauty of spring. 

In analysing the inherent associations of the concave and 
C3nvex 2 Fechner seems more successful, plainly owing to the 
greater facility for analysis afforded by their complex forms. 
He has no difficulty in showing that the concave appears as 
a rule receptive, and the convex exclusive or repellent, except 



1 M.P., iii. 100. 



2 lb, 105. 

c c 



3 86 



HISTORY OF AESTHETIC. 



in the case of surfaces such as those of cushions, which are 
convex in order to become concave. 

In this region of essential association Fechner does not ob- 
tain any great results. But, if detailed analysis, such as exact 
aesthetic pursues, is to have any value at all, I think that his 
method points in the right direction. 

As a case closely analogous to the results of such analysis, 
we may treat the phenomena of the law of economy, which 
Fechner ranks, after his eclectic manner, as "a principle 
of aesthetic." In reality, this principle is merely a deduction 
from the law of unity in variety, and as directed against super- 
fluity in the parts of an aesthetic structure coincides almost 
verbally with Aristotle's warning, that a part which is not 
necessary is no part of the whole. 1 

" In their treatise on the organs of locomotion," writes 
Professor Vierordt, 2 " the brothers Weber I have demon- 
strated, in several passages and by striking examples, that 
the aesthetically beautiful is also on the whole the physio- 
logically correct ; that the two coincide, that the impression 
of beauty (ease, unconstrainedness, freedom) is always pro- 
duced by results attained at the least possible expense of 
muscular force." 

This principle, as Fechner observes, may be treated either 
with reference to the content of our presentations, in which 
it is pleasant to us, through sympathy, to see the economical 
employment of force, or with reference to the course of our 
presentations, there being an economy of attention in the 
observation of movements that are economical in the ex- 
penditure of force. Both of these aspects of the law of 
economy were insisted on by Mr. Herbert Spencer, 4 as early 
as the years 1852 and 1854 respectively. The second is 
capable of being treated as a law of pure formalistic 
psychology, and Fechner is led by it to raise the whole 
question of the psychical nature and conditions of pleasure, 
without, however, arriving at a positive conclusion. Only he 
decides that it is impossible to set up the law of economy as 



1 P. 32 above. 

2 Quoted by Fechner, V. d. A., ii. 263. 

3 See reference to their work in Ward, " Psychology," Encycl. Brit. 

4 Essay on " The Philosophy of Style " and on " Gracefulness," republished 
in Essays Scientific, Political, and Speculative, vol. ii. 



THE LAMP OF SACRIFICE. 



387 



the fundamental principle of aesthetic psychology. It is, in- 
deed, as we have seen, a plainly derivative law. 

It is worth while, in order to remove a seeming contradic- 
tion with the deepest aesthetic criticism, to point out that this 
principle, being simply a consequence of the relation of parts 
within a whole, can have no claim to determine what the 
nature of the whole, its essence or purpose, shall be. Thus 
we find room for the apparently antagonistic principle of 
lavishness or sacrifice. 

A good engineer does not adjust his supporting forces with 
absolute exactness to the greatest estimated burden. He 
leaves a margin of safety against unforeseen hazards which 
has, even in works of pure utility, a sort of aesthetic effect in 
the mental security of all who are concerned with the struc- 
ture. And so, we are told to-day, with apparent truth, a 
certain lavishness of force is a noble quality not merely in 
the ornament, but in the very substantiality and strength of 
domestic buildings. Security of mind, the sense of perma- 
nence, the absence of any suggestion that the building is 
meanly calculated to the immediate owner's interest, appear 
to be aesthetic properties which demand a certain bounty and 
largeness in the provision of strength and solidity. 

In a more intense degree these same properties take the 
form of "sacrifice"; 1 but neither a margin of safety, nor 
lavishness, nor sacrifice, is identical with waste or incom- 
patible with economy. A large conception of purpose and 
effect is one thing ; the most effective adjustment of forces to 
it when conceived is another. 

From Fechner we have gained but little in positive principle, 
but something in method and tangible elucidation, which latter 
is very necessary to aesthetic science if it is not to hang in mid- 
air. And our judgment of formal aesthetic, that it is the theory 
of antiquity armed with the methods of modern science, has in 
him received a striking confirmation. 

stumpf. scope 6. So far, finally, as I am able to form an opinion 
of ins Analysis. on tfiQ development of psychological theory re- 
specting music in the hands of Professor Stumpf, 2 it appears 

1 See " Lamp of Sacrifice " in Seven Lamps of Architecture, where the dis- 
tinction between bounty and waste is well insisted on, and Wordsworth's 
sonnet on King's College Chapel. 

2 Author of Musikpsychologie in England, 1885, and Tonfisychologie, of 
which vol. ii. appeared in 1890. 



3 88 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



to me that Herbart's original admissions retain their full force. 1 
The completed work of musical art, even in the comparatively 
simple form of an entire melody, does not, as I gather, come 
strictly within the scope of his analysis. The facts of con- 
sonance produced by the "blending" of tones, an ethical or 
emotional import 2 ascribed to single sounds of certain definite 
types (soft deep notes, soft high notes, etc.) and to certain 
definite intervals, and some very general conditions of musical 
pleasure such as dim analogies with verbal utterance, and the 
constant renewal of the listener's expectation, appear to be the 
only factors which exact psychology is able as yet to discern 
by analysis within the musically beautiful. The difficulty 
which Herbart admitted still remains ; the elements which 
can be readily analysed do not penetrate into the character- 
istic differences which make one musical whole beautiful and 
another trivial or tedious. And there is in the background 
a dark suspicion that these alleged expressive qualities of 
isolated factors may be really faint associative suggestions 
drawn from the character which they assume in those com- 
plex combinations of which they most readily remind us. 
conclusion ^* ^ n ta ^ n g leave at this point of purely 
formal or exact aesthetic — for in the English and 
German writers who have yet to be considered we shall only 
find it in subordination to other ideas — I will attempt in a 
few paragraphs to estimate its achievement and its prospects. 

how judge of i- We must not test it by a standard which it is 
Formal Esthetic. a blunder to apply to any aesthetic theory what- 
ever. No aesthetic theory 3 can give appreciable assistance in 
the construction of individual works of art, or can adequately 
represent their beauty in another, viz. an intellectual medium. 
We should do injustice to Herbart and Zimmermann, if we 



1 Not being qualified to judge independently in musical questions, I here 
follow the representations of the late Mr. Edmund Gurney in the paper "The 
Psychology of Music," Tertiuni Quid, ii. 251. My only addition to his argument 
consists in noting the parallelism between defects which he ascribes to the 
views of Prof. Stumpf, and the admissions made by Herbart. See p. 371 above. 

2 This ascription while far too little for objective idealism is far too much 
for exact formalism. 

3 What about counterpoint, which Herbart includes in aesthetic ? The 
answer is, that the artist may embody his experience in rules, though it is 
hazardous, especially outside music, to attach great value to them. But these 
rules are data of aesthetic, not its content, because they come from the 
practice of the art and not from reflection upon its capacities. 



LIMIT OF FORMAL ESTHETIC. 



389 



were to interpret their conviction of the all-importance of 
elementary relations, as indicating the belief that works of 
genius could be constructed by rule and line, or fairly re- 
presented in a system of abstract reflections. For exact 
aesthetic, as for the aesthetic of concrete idealism, the only 
conceivable problem is the explanation of beauty in the light 
of general principles aided by the analysis of individual 
examples given in nature or in art. 
Lesson of its ii. If therefore formal aesthetic is pronounced 

History. a f a ii ure m th e presence of concrete individual 
beauty, this verdict does not refer to the task of prior con- 
struction, nor of reproduction in intellectual form, but only to 
the problem of subsequent analysis for speculative purposes. 
Allowing for the greater depth and variety of modern exact 
science as compared with that of antiquity, the work of formal 
aesthetic in modern times corresponds with the strictly Greek 
aesthetic of Plato and Aristotle, and is checked, as in the main 
theirs also was checked, at the point where beauty passes 
into concrete individual form. Whole and part, unity in variety, 
simple colours, simple sounds (to which in modern times we 
must add simple consonances and unsuccessful attempts to 
deal with colour harmony), spatial figures, rhythms (and in 
modern analysis the peculiar case of rhyme) are the object- 
matter about which exact aesthetic is able to supplement the 
suggestions of the Greek philosophers from the wealth of 
modern physics and modern psychology. 

That with this achievement it has attained its limit as an 
independent method appears to be proved both by its diver- 
gences and by its concessions. 

We cannot but be surprised when we find that the thinkers 
who set out by holding tight to the beautiful datum in its 
sensuous peculiarity, 1 are also those who attribute its peculiar 
effectiveness to the most abstract and isolated underlying 
relations. It is true that the relation is conceived as a genuine 
cause operating in an assignable mode, and not reducible to a 
mere mathematical expression, but this does not alter the fact 
that the operation, as defined by the relation, is of so general 
a nature as to be void of relevancy to the individual beautiful 
effect in a context of art, as distinguished from that which is 
not beautiful in such a context. 



1 Herbart, I.e., p. 369 supra. 



390 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



And thus, to refer for a moment to an English writer for 
the sake of illustration, we find that within the exact school 
the peculiarity of the concrete datum comes at last to be 
vehemently asserted, 1 against the psychological side of the 
school, as incompatible with the analysis of it by dissolution, 
and with the reference of its character in fragments to abstract 
and isolated relations. 

This antagonism seems really to be implicit in Herbart, 
Intellectual analysis of the datum, when once entered upon, 
cannot come to rest in abstractions. It must go forward 
till it recognises 2 on the intellectual side a concreteness ad- 
equate to that which the datum of beauty exhibits on the 
sensuous side. 

The concessions of formal aesthetic tell the same tale. In 
Zimmermann as compared with Herbart we notice, a, the in- 
clusion of the " characteristic" in the list of formal relations — 
an extraordinary tour de force; and, b, the softening of the 
opposition between classical and romantic, which in Herbart 
and Schopenhauer meant a degree of preference for the more 
narrowly definite forms of art, into a distinction, applicable to 
all periods of history, between beauty that attaches to com- 
plete conception and beauty attached to incomplete conception 
and dependent for its attractiveness on subjective interests. 
Room is thus made to include great work of any period under 
the term "classical." 

Further, in Fechner, in Prof. Stumpf, and in the best recent 
English psychology and exact musical theory, 3 the principle 
of association is accepted as of paramount importance, in con- 
tradiction with Schopenhauer, and essentially with Herbart. 
Even the term "utterance" has been applied by the very 
competent analyst 4 above referred to, as indicating by analogy 
a peculiar impression which beautiful melody conveyed to his 
mind. 

These divergences and concessions exhibit, if I am right, 
the spectacle, too familiar in philosophy, of the concrete world- 
spirit freakishly decoying into blind paths the explorer who 
has refused his guidance, and coming in by the window when 
he is barred out at the door. 

1 By Gurney, Tertiiun Quid, ii. 279, in opposition to Stumpf. 

2 I do not say " constructs." 

3 E.g. in Ward and Gurney. 

4 Gurney, ib. } 274. 



BEAUTY AND ATTENTION. 



391 



r„«i„«H,vn iii- It has been remarked with regard to what 

Inclusion of & 

Exact .Esthetic used in ethics to be called U tilitananism, now 
commonly known as Hedonism, that it takes 
upon itself the hazard of exclusiveness. Other theories do 
not profess to exclude it, but it professes to exclude them. 
The same is true of the relation between formal aesthetic 
and the aesthetic of concrete idealism. There can be no 
precise analysis of the psychical operation of beautiful form 
for which a place is not ready and waiting in the theory 
of beauty as expressiveness. Enough has been said, I 
hope, in dealing with the Greek thinkers to make this re- 
lation absolutely clear. Only it may be well to supply out 
of the present chapter a single link which there remained in 
a great measure hypothetical. We then supposed that the 
simple forms which please, derive their satisfactoriness from 
some latent affinity, other than sensuous stimulation, between 
them and the feeling of intelligent beings. In the principle 
of economy as applied to the pleasure of watching graceful 
movements, by Fechner and his authorities, we appear to 
follow the actual operation of such a latent harmony. In the 
first place, movement economical of force embodies the 
principle of organic unity, negatively requiring the absence 
of superfluous elements. Ultimately indeed the principle 
develops into that of the characteristic. This absence of 
superfluity we realise in terms of feeling by inherent associa- 
tion with our own muscular adjustments. And in the second 
place it is suggested that in the apprehension of such move- 
ments our attention is so economised that as a psychical occur- 
rence the apprehension is easy and pleasant per se, so that we 
have at once our satisfactory content and an agreeable per- 
ception of it. And as adequacy of expression to content is 
not an accident, but the very essence of beauty, it is not 
improbable that this thoroughgoing connection between the 
working of our attention and the properties of a beautiful 
content may turnout to be normal. It is plain, of course, that 
in concrete cases of beauty the psychical occurrences must be 
required to take on very complex shapes, which may or may 
not in individual minds undo their own agreeableness by 
fatigue owing to their sheer quantity, or by contradictions 
beyond the reconciling power of the individual mind in ques- 
tion. 

The reader should remember that for the reason alleged 



392 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



above, the principle of lavishness is not opposed to that of 
economy. The most graceful movements are often those 
which are superfluous when judged by definite purposes of 
life ; but their course will possess a harmonious unity which 
will be distinguishable from the inharmonious and wasteful 
abruptness of similar movements ungracefully performed. 

Finally, it may be laid down that idealism without detail is 
idle speculation ; and formal or exact aesthetic, in its various 
shapes as the observation of universally beautiful structure, 
as its analysis into abstract relations, and as the causal ex- 
planation of their agreeableness in terms of the psychical 
movement, is an indispensable instrument in the hand of 
idealism. 

But in the analysis of the great individual creations of art 
or the more complex effects of nature, it is not probable that 
all the links of formal explanation will ever be supplied. In 
these cases the delight of self-utterance and self-recognition 
overrides, though it cannot dispense with, the elements of 
abstract satisfaction, and the appreciation of character and 
passion and the moods of Nature, though at every turn sus- 
tained and elucidated, will not be exhaustively analysed by 
exhibiting the rationale of composition in all its minutiae, and 
of harmonious effect upon sense-perception. And moreover 
we shall find that in the employment of such analysis, con- 
formably to a principle on which I have more than once 
insisted, the interpreter who is on the alert for refinements of 
import — that is, the idealist with a grasp of reality — will 
distance all competitors. 



CHAPTER XIV. 



THE METHODICAL COMPLETION OF OBJECTIVE IDEALISM. 

Type of the J - While the votaries of exact aesthetic were 
Lat i e Lan s e m ive attem P tm g t0 explain the pleasantness of beauty 
in terms of psychological analysis, the heirs of 
objective Idealism were striving to attain a corresponding 
precision in the method of their content- or expression- 
theory. In the course of this attempt they called attention 
to a neglected question of supreme aesthetic importance in 
the problem of ugliness, and also in some degree included the 
formalistic point of view in their own by appropriating from 
modern science its best warranted analyses of aesthetic 
phenomena. 

On the other hand, with the increased accentuation of 
method, and the attempt to summarise results in accurate 
abstractions, their work has unavoidably assumed a certain 
tinge of scholasticism. By this term I designate the divorce 
between content and formulation ; nor can I altogether conceal 
my conviction that the appreciation of actual beauty among 
the German aesthetic philosophers of the last half century is 
less vital, though infinitely more learned, than that shown by 
the giant race whom they succeeded. 

One characteristic of the most distinguished of the recent 
aesthetic writers in Germany demands our special attention, 
although in criticising it the present writer is also by impli- 
cation criticising himself. It is easy to say that the substan- 
tive strength of the idealist school resides throughout in its 
historical research, and in illustration of this to compare the 
historical method of Schelling and Hegel, or of Winckelmann 
and Schiller, with the historical treatises of Schasler, Zimmer- 
mann, 1 Carriere, Lotze, and Hartmann. But when we look 
closer at the two types of thought which are thus compared, 

1 Taking Zimmermann, who is a formalist, as representing by his historical 
treatment the rapprochement between formalists and idealists alluded to 
above. 

393 



394 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



we observe an essential difference between them. In the 
earlier type, the historical factor depends upon the conception 
that the evolution of beauty in all its phases and stages is 
the object-matter of aesthetic science. The " dialectic " is 
conceived as "immanent" — as consisting, that is to say, in 
the operation of historical forces and in the cumulative in- 
fluence of the human mind upon itself. The opinions of 
philosophers do not appear in aesthetic, but are more com- 
pletely correlated with the world and with each other in the 
full context of the history of philosophy. 

In the later type, the science has become definitory and 
formal, and the history, no longer directly included in the 
object-matter of the science, has turned into a chronicle of 
philosophic opinion. In this way the science and the history 
have fallen apart ; and we have passed from the scientific 
history of the actual beautiful, to its formal, though would-be 
concrete, analysis on the one hand, and to the history of 
aesthetic philosophy as such upon the other. Now it is true 
that the latter may be utilised as the clarified expression of 
the former ; and it is true that Schasler, and more fully the 
learned and enthusiastic Carriere, have understood the histori- 
cal problem in this way. The present writer however, while 
aware that he is to a great extent following in their track, 
has attempted to bend back the line of historical enquiry 
towards the evolution of beauty as an objective though mental 
phenomenon, and away from the mere affiliation of philo- 
sophical opinions. 

Transition to the 2 ; But before proceeding to deal with the 
Later objective critical and methodical views of such writers as 

Idealism. « . , . . -, 

those just mentioned, it is necessary to trace the 
antecedents of their position in the admission within aesthetic 
philosophy of the theory of ugliness, which had been knocking 
at the door ever since the beginning of romantic art, if not 
ever since Plotinus. 

soig-er °" ^ e saw tbat Messing admitted the ugly 

into poetry as a means to the comic and the 
terrible, 1 while denying it a place in formative art ; and that 
Schlegel 2 definitely proposed it as an object of theoretical 
inquiry, intending to keep it wholly outside the beautiful, but 
finding how inevitably it forced its way in. In Goethe and 



1 P. 226 supra. 



2 P. 301 supra. 



THE THEORY OF UGLINESS. 



395 



Schiller, Kant and Hegel, we found no elaborate treatment 
of this subject. In Goethe and Hegel, however, this was 
partly due to the very amplitude and robustness of their 
conception of beauty. For the fact of real aesthetic moment 
on this side is the extension and deepening of the beautiful 
by the inclusion of apparent ugliness, and when this, the 
ugly that can enter into the beautiful, is provided for, the 
detailed analysis of the ugly, if any, that can never be 
taken up into beauty, is less essential to aesthetic science. \\ e 
observed upon Goethe's sympathy for the strong and the 
significant or characteristic, and we noted that for Hegel 
ugliness is a relative conception, depending on a contradiction 
with true individuality, and only rising to absoluteness if and 
in as far as such a contradiction assumes the form of irrecon- 
cilable perversity. In this point, the existence of apparent 
or merely relative ugliness, he is more truly represented by 
the thoroughly concrete theorists such as Schasler and Hart- 
mann, than by those who, with Rosenkranz — though even 
they not wholly — consider ugliness as essentially falling out- 
side the beautiful. 

This latter view, which was necessary to pave the way for 
an explicit recognition of the place of apparent ugliness 
within concrete characterization, is briefly and pregnantly 
formulated in Solger's lectures on Esthetic. 1 I quote a 
leading passage, from which Solger's relation to Schlegel 
and also to later theorists on the subject of ugliness, may 
be clearly seen : — ■ 

The Comic and the Tragic, Solger is maintaining, 2 both 
lie within the conception of the beautiful. Beauty as such 
is the perfect unity of idea and phenomenon (" Erscheinung"\ 
and is opposed both to the pure idea, and to the common- 
place phenomenon or manifestation ("Ersckeiming") of reality. 
Tragedy is the "idea" as emphasized by annihilation of it 
(in the phenomenon 3 ). Comedy is the idea recognised as 
asserting itself throughout even the most commonplace 
existence. But if, instead of asserting itself, it ceases to be 

1 o 7 



1 Delivered 1819, prepared for publication by Heyse, and published in 
1829 (before the appearance of Hegel's Alsthetic). The lectures are more 
direct and scientific in style than Solger's dialogue Erwin (1815) appears 
to be. For an estimate of Solger, see Hegel's s£sth., Introd., E. Tr. p. 131. 

2 Vorlesungen iiber Aesthetik, pp. 100-102. 

3 P. 102. 



396 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



recognised in the sphere of common life and phenomena, 
then either we have the prosaic view of the world, which fails 
to be ugly only because it is wholly apart from aesthetic 
feeling, or we have ugliness, which arises "when 1 the human 
mind finds in the commonplace phenomenon (' in dergemeinen 
Erscheinimg ') something essential, wherein the phenomenon, 
divorced from the idea, has independent reality. This 
element," he continues, "becomes as an independent principle 
the opposite of beauty, and so the commonplace phenomenon 
becomes the exact opposite of the idea. 2 In this consists the 
principle of the ugly, the basis of which is not in mere 
defectiveness by the standard of natural laws. And, again, 
the ugly does not consist in the serious (prosaic) considera- 
tion of things ; this belongs rather to moral judgment, being 
wholly removed from the conception of the beautiful. 

" If anything is to be recognised as the opposite of the 
beautiful, the same thing must be looked for in it that is looked 
for in the beautiful, and the opposite found. If the idea is 
really lacking, and the mere phenomenon gives itself out 
for the essence, then the ugly makes its appearance. The 
ugly is a rebellion against the beautiful, as the evil 
against the good. It is always a pretended principle, in 
which the different tendencies of existence converge [as they 
do truly in the beautiful]. Natural imperfections are not 
ugly, except in so far as in this complication of external forces 
something is taken to reveal itself which aims at concen- 
trating these mere forces as essential in themselves. 3 Bodily 
ugliness only arises through a false principle of mere exist- 
ence [eg. of animal as against spiritual existence, or mere 
cell-growth against healthy animal life] being foisted upon 
the human organism. Just so, a disposition which opposes 
itself to the beautiful by concentrating the commonplace into 
a single point, 4 and acquiescing therein, is an ugly dispo- 
sition. Mere contingency and maladaptation, therefore, are 
not enough to constitute ugliness ; it is necessary in addition 



1 Vorlesimgen ilber Aesthetik, p. 101. 

2 The derivation of Vischer's view from this is very plain ; see K. G., 
vi., 113, on the war between the idea and and the image ("Bild," or 
" Erscheinimg "). 

3 i.e. no doubt, as forming an individual existence antagonistic to that in 
which they appear — like parasites, etc. 

4 In the sense, I imagine, of making it a purpose. 



UGLINESS AKIN TO BEAUTY. 



397 



that in the things which are thus self-contradictory there 
shall be a unity, which [really] could only be the idea, but 
is sought for in purely phenomenal existence. 

"The ugly is the first form in which commonplace exist- 
ence opposes itself to the beautiful, Like evil, it displays 
itself only as the negation of the idea, but as a negation that 
assumes positive shape, inasmuch as it aspires to set itself in 
the place of the latter." — " The ugly is therefore positively 
opposed to the beautiful, and we can only regard them as 
absolutely exclusive of each other." 

The noteworthy results of this conception are two. 

First, real ugliness is thus treated as a positive negation or 
falsehood aspiring to the place of beauty, and therefore abso- 
lutely exclusive of the latter and excluded by it. This, in so 
far as we are able at all to recognise real or invincible ugliness 
as a fact, we shall find to be the true explanation of that fact. 

But secondly, as ugliness is thus identified with a certain 
positive relation of the same factors that enter into beauty, as 
something in which we look for beauty though we do not find 
it, an affinity between the two is admitted. There thus arises 
a tendency to bring the ugly closer and closer to the frontier 
of the beautiful, as bearing special relation to one or other 
of the species generated within the phases of beauty by the 
changing correlation of its elements. Thus, as I understand 
Solger in the Lectures on ^Esthetic, though he does not 
think that the ugly qua ugly can come within the borders 
of art (and in this, with Weisse and against Rosenkranz, he 
is surely right), yet it is essential to his view that beauty in 
passing through its phases from the sublime to the comic 
comes very close to the ugly, from which it is only saved by 
the self-assertion of the strong and cheerful idea or ideal 
within the most wretched phenomenal details, giving rise to 
the spirit of true comedy. 

Here we have the germ of a theory dealing not only with 
ugliness outside the beautiful, but with the appearance of a 
necessary movement within the realm of beauty towards 
something akin to ugliness. 

Reference to @- ^ do not propose to attempt an adequate 

weisse and account of Weisse 1 or of Vischer. 2 

Weisse appears to have had the substantial 

1 Weisse's Aesthetik, 1830. 

2 Vischer's Aesihetik^ 1846-57, comprises two vols, of general theory re- 



398 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



merit of insisting on the position of ugliness in aesthetic 
theory, and especially of insisting on Solger's point that posi- 
tive or actual ugliness (as distinct from mere defectiveness of 
beauty) is something that claims the place and simulates the 
powers of the beautiful — a morbid but fascinating presenta- 
tion. He does not contemplate the entrance of what is really 
ugly into the region of art except through entire subordina- 
tion, which in his view can only take place by means of the 
comic or the romantic spirit. Thus, as Hartmann observes, 
the characteristic is omitted, excepting, we must add, in as far 
as it takes comic or romantic form. As a consequence of this 
omission it would seem that little light can be thrown on the 
enlargement or deepening of beauty in the strict sense. We 
want to know how beauty itself is found to be modified and 
graduated, as in Winckelmann's account of it, by the claims 
of expression and of the characteristic with their introduc- 
tion of apparent ugliness, and the addition of the comic and 
romantic to the forms of beauty does not thoroughly facet his 
problem. The defective synthesis betrays itself in defective 
aesthetic judgment. Thus, we are told, Weisse can see no 
beauty in waste and desert places. It seems to him that in 
them the inorganic elements refuse their function of acting 
as a basis for organic life. This notion is descended from 
Hegel's exaggerated estimate of the aesthetic importance 
attaching to the ascending scale of organic life. It is wholly 
discrepant with our present feeling for the beautiful. 1 

Moreover Weisse, as also Vischer and Rosenkranz, at- 
tempted a dialectic construction of the phases of beauty, some- 
what on Solger's lines, bringing the ugly into special connec- 
tion with the progressive movement from the sublime to the 
comic. There is no doubt that some connection may be 
traced between the phases of beauty and its progressive 
power of mastering and subordinating to itself the sterner and 
stranger elements of presentation. We have seen in Hegel 
an attempt to exhibit such a movement, with full explanation 
of the immanent causes and cumulative influences by which 
the successive stages were brought to pass. It would be 
foolish to imply that Hegel's analysis is final, and I only refer 



specting beauty, continued in four vols, entitled Die Kiinste, dealing 
copiously with the several arts. 

1 For Weisse's view of ugliness see Hartmann, Aes/h., ii. 364 ff. 



THE LATER DIALECTIC. 



399 



to it in order to emphasise the distinction between a dialectic 
which assigns its own definite import, and one which seems 
simply to ring the changes upon technical terms of aesthetic, 
and logical designations for forms of negative relation, which, 
apart from a very explicit context, convey no import at all. 1 
The self- conflicts of the beautiful lead, it is said, from the 
sublime through the ugly to the comic (Weisse), or the evolu- 
tion passes from the sublime through the comic to the beau- 
tiful 2 (Vischer), or the beautiful denies itself in the ugly and 
is restored to itself in the comic (Rosenkranz). 

The underlying perception throughout all these expressions 
is probably that embodied in the passage quoted above from 
Solger and also involved in Hegel's view of the comic, that 
any conflict or meanness can be reconciled with beauty, if the 
strong and genial spirit of the ideal pervades it with a sense 
of victorious security. But in all this, though much truth is 
implied, there is no thorough-going reconstruction of the 
idea of beauty ; beauty remains a phase of the excellent in 
art, among other phases, or else is stretched into an unmean- 
ing title, and the actual affinity that permeates the whole 
world of characteristic expression, which Goethe and Hegel 
had grasped, is in danger of being lost to view. 

In the case of Vischer, the enterprise of coping with his 
immense array of volumes is rendered especially dishearten- 
ing by the fact that the author himself in his later years has 
criticised 3 his great work with severe candour. Two points 
are noteworthy. In the second part of the ^Esthetic, follow- 
ing upon the metaphysic of the beautiful which occupies the 
first volume, and treating of " The beautiful in its one-sided 
existence," he had dealt with beauty (i.) in its "objective" exis- 
tence as the beauty of nature, and (ii.) in its "subjective" 
existence as imagination. This distinction, in virtue of which 
his treatment of natural beauty extended into an immense 
range of detail, surveying inorganic and organic nature, the 
types of humanity and the course of history, his later criticism 
rightly condemns. " The section on natural beauty must 
go." 4 All beauty is in perception, and in fact whenever art 
and imagination are dealt with it is essential to recur to the 

1 See below on Rosenkranz. 

2 See Schasler, A,, 959. 

3 Vischer, Kritische Gcinge, No. 5, 1863 ; No. 6, 1873. 

4 Krit G., v. 11. 



4oo 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



material afforded them by nature. The views of chap, i, of 
the present work could not be more strikingly confirmed. 
We see a genuine treatment of natural beauty in its true 
relation to art in the whole range of Mr. Ruskin's critical 
labours. 

Again, Vischer's later criticism condemns as inadequate the 
position given to ugliness in his great work. 1 He now admits 
that Weisse and Schasler have estimated more truly than 
himself the necessity of ugliness as an element without which 
the concrete modifications of the beautiful cannot arise. 

It must be added that in his treatment of poetry he remains 
wholly on the old ground of the distinction into Epic, Lyric, 
and Dramatic, and therefore fails to appreciate the problem 
presented by the cessation of some types and the substitution 
of others for them. Thus he attempts to force the Divina 
Commedia into the form of an Epic, and as this is plainly 
impossible, pronounces the form of Dante's poem to be in 
contradiction with the essence of poetic art. 2 How far more 
profound is Schelling's estimate ! 3 

On the other hand it should be noted that Vischer has 
some conception of the relation between art and workman- 
ship, 4 of the difficulties raised for the latter by modern me- 
chanical production for the world-market, 5 and of the problems 
affecting the future of art 6 in their whole perplexing intensity. 
There is much, therefore, in his works that would be of 
interest to the reader to-day, could it be disengaged from his 
formal dialectic and from the huge bulk of his volumes. But 
there is not much, I should imagine, which cannot now be 
obtained from other sources, and I therefore cannot help fear- 
ing that this colossal monument of real knowledge, capacity, 
and industry will have little effect on the future course of 
aesthetic science. 

7. I now pass to Rosenkranz, who while be- 

Rosenkranz. , . , < . TT , * . 

longing to the earlier post-Hegelians by his 
attachment to the ideas of Solger, yet treated the question of 
ugliness with a detail and insight which made his work a 
point of transition to the later and more thoroughly concrete 
conceptions. The connection is well marked by the fact that 



1 Krit. G., vi. 115. 2 Die Kiinste, Bk. iv., p. 1300. 

3 See p. 325 supra. 4 Die Kiinste, i. 87. 

5 ^-j 337- 6 Aesth., ii. 298. 



THE NEGATION OF BEAUTY. 



401 



Schasler dedicates his Kritiscke Gcschichte der Aesthetik to 
Rosenkranz. 

ugliness as i. The title of Rosenkranz's work. The ^Esthetic 
such. 0 jr Ugliness* indicates his point of view. The 
editor of Kant, and biographer of Hegel, he desired to com- 
plete the fabric of aesthetic theory on the side of it which 
appeared to him, not unjustly, to be defective. He accord- 
ingly conceives of Ugliness as a distinct object-matter, outside 
the beautiful, and thus demanding separate treatment, but de- 
termined throughout by relativity to the beautiful, and thus 
belonging to aesthetic theory. 

The ugly as such 2 is the negation of the beautiful, inasmuch 
as the same factors which give rise to beauty are capable of 
being perverted into their opposites — I should have preferred 
to say, "perverted, by a change of relation, into its opposite." 
Ugliness and beauty are genuinely distinct, and the former 
does not enter into the latter as a constituent part ; but yet, 
as both contain the same factors, it is possible for the ugly to 
be subordinated to the beautiful in a further and more com- 
plex phase of aesthetic appearance, viz. the comic. As I 
understand Rosenkranz, therefore, the comic, though akin to 
the beautiful, does not form a species of it, but is rather a con- 
tinuation of its principle in a new shape, after the rebellion of 
the ugly has been overcome. 

There is an obvious analogy between these ideas and those 
of Solger. The philosopher's chief interest is still concen- 
trated on the ugly as given in natural opposition to the beau- 
tiful, and not on the qualities within the acknowledged beautiful 
which exhibit an affinity between it and what is commonly 
taken to be ugly. Our principal concern, therefore, is with 
the mode in which positive negation is here conceived, as 
tending to limit the sphere of the most genuine ugliness ; with 
the very remarkable ground on which ugliness is after all ad- 
mitted within the frontiers of fine art ; and with the use made 
throughout of the notions of negation and contrariety, which 
is typical for the whole range of post- Hegelian dialectic. 

The .-Esthetic of ugliness follows a course analogous to the 
/Esthetic of beauty. Ugliness, 3 as the negation of beauty, 



1 Aesthetik des Hasslichtn, 1853. 

2 A. d. H., P . 7. 

3 A. d. If., p. 167. cf. p. 63. 



D D 



HISTORY OF ^ESTHETIC. 



must be the positive perversion of the sublime (into the mean 
or commonplace, " gemein"), of the pleasing (" gefcillig" into 
the repugnant, " wzdrzg"), or of the simply beautiful (into 
caricature). And thus, although defective form and want of 
natural or historical truth (''Formlessness" and "Incorrect- 
ness ") are lower grades in which the tendency to ugliness 
reveals itself, yet true or real ugliness is not attained until in 
a being capable of freedom we find the attribute of un-freedom 
positively manifested in the place which freedom should hold. 1 
The tendency of this view, although allowance is made for the 
application of such ideas by analogy to unconscious objects, is 
of course to restrict the rangfe of real ugliness to man and 

<- 2 & 

art. 

It is remarkable how little the de facto kinship of so-called 
ugliness and familiar beauty has down to this time struck the 
perception of aesthetic theorists with the exception of Hegel 
and Goethe. The sublime has indeed at last come to be 
ranked as a species of the beautiful, 3 which is a great advance 
on the theory of Kant. But on the whole Rosenkranz con- 
templates the task before him as a descent into " the hell of 
the world of beauty," 4 a desolate and miserable region, and 
seems to have no feeling for the pervading elements of force, 
depth, splendour and grace, within the strange, the tragic, 
and the terrible, which unmistakably and beyond dispute carry 
some qualities of the simplest beauty, often in the highest per- 
fection, through much of the sphere in which ugliness reigns 
for the commonplace observer. We do not feel, with him, 
that it is a painful and almost perilous adventure to enter into 
the infernal world of Dante [and of Milton ?], of Orcagna and 
Michael Angelo, of Spohr [and of Berlioz ?]. I throw the 
blame of his attitude in these respects partly on the aesthetic 
conditions of the early nineteenth century, partly on the tradi- 
dition of Winckelmann's " ideal," which, like every tradition, 

1 P. 167. 

2 P. 4. " The ugliest ugliness is not that which disgusts us in objects of 
nature, in the swamp, the distorted tree, in toads and reptiles, goggle-eyed 
fish monsters, and massive pachyderms, in rats and monkeys [I do not admit 
the view of real ugliness implied in this enumeration] ; it is the egoism which 
reveals its madness in malicious and frivolous gesture, in the furrows drawn by 
passion, in the shifty look of the eye, and in crime." Cf. p. 53, on the morbid 
delight of a corrupt age in depraved art. 

3 P. 167. 
* P. 3. 



THE "FOIL" THEORY. 



403 



rapidly lost the depth and vitality of its founder's ideas. It 
seemed necessary to indicate this deep-seated quality of the 
author's feeling, although I am about to show that he makes 
an important step towards the recognition of this very affinity 
against which he was so strongly biassed. 

ugliness in h- The " ugliest ugliness," of which I spoke 
Art - above, includes the ugliness of art, i.e. ugly or bad 
art. But especially to a thinker for whom the ugly is so pro- 
minent a fact as it is for Rosenkranz, there is also an inevitable 
question concerning the ugly in art. This question he meets 
with candour and insight, though in doing so he raises a con- 
tradiction fatal to the unity of his own doctrine. 

Starting from the assumption, which in the sense implied 
is more than doubtful, that art arises from the yearning after 
pure unmixed beauty, 1 he asks the obvious question : "Is it 
not, then, the sharpest contradiction when we see art repro- 
ducing the ugly as well as the beautiful ? " And if we reply 
that it reproduces the ugly only as beautiful, has this any re- 
sult except to pile up a second contradiction on the top of the 
first ? 2 

The first answer which presents itself, that the ugly is ad- 
mitted into art only as a foil that heightens the beautiful, and 
therefore for the sake of beauty and not in its own right, 
Rosenkranz rejects, justly, though not perhaps on the true 
ground. For he regards beauty as something distinct, positive, 
and independent, and therefore refuses to consider it as in 
need of any foil or dark background. No doubt this view 
has a relative truth in so far as beauty is positive and real 
ugliness is negative. But it rests too much on a supposed 
separateness and purity of the beautiful, treating it always as 
something obvious and given, incapable of strangeness and 
difficulty, and not demanding any special effort or capacity to 
penetrate its depths and disguises. The truer reason, that 
what commonplace perception views as ugly is often far too 
prominent in the noblest art, and too deeply imbued with un- 
deniable qualities of beauty, to be explained as a mere foil for 
beautiful elements distinct from itself, seems hardly to have 
been within the scope of Rosenkranz's aesthetic judgment or 
analysis. But it was something gained to be rid of the " foil" 
theory, for any reason whatever. 



1 P- 35- 



2 P. 36. 



40 4 



HISTORY OF .ESTHETIC. 



The second answer which he suggests is of great signifi- 
cance. " If 1 art is not to represent the idea in a merely one- 
sided way, it cannot dispense with the ugly. The pure ideals 
exhibit to us no doubt the most important, that is, the positive 
element of the beautiful ; but if mind and nature are to be 
admitted to presentation in their full dramatic depth, then the 
ugly of nature, and the evil and diabolic, must not be omitted. 
The Greeks, however much they lived in the ideal, 2 had 
nevertheless their Hekatoncheires, Cyclopes, Satyrs, Graiae, 
Empusae, Harpies, Chimaeras ; they had a lame god, and 
represented in their tragedies the most horrible crimes {e.g. 
in the GEdipus and the Oresteia), madness (in the Ajax), 
nauseating diseases (in the Philoctetes), and in their comedy, 
vices and infamies of all kinds. Moreover , along with the 
Christian religion, as that which teaches men to know evil in 
its root and overcome it fundamentally, the ugly is finally and 
in principle introduced into the world of art. For this reason 
therefore, in order to depict the concrete manifestation of the 
idea in its totality, art cannot omit the portrayal of the ugly. 
Its apprehension of the idea would be sttperficial if it tried to 
limit itself to simple beauty!' 

Does the so-called ugly, we then naturally ask, undergo any 
modification when it presents itself in art ? 

Rosenkranz gives a twofold answer. In the first place 
what is ugly cannot have independent existence in art. 
Though it is false that beauty needs a foil, it is true that 
ugliness does. The ugly old woman whom painters place 
beside Danae could not be the subject of a separate picture, 
except either in genre-painting, when the situation gives the 
aesthetic interest, or as a portrait, which is primarily concerned 
with historical correctness. 3 I take it that these exceptions, 
in their context, are startling to our judgment. Of course 
the example is the author's, and if we are to understand it as 
ex hypothesi a case of ugliness insuperable by art, the ques- 
tion falls to the ground. But a few pages before 4 he has 
referred to the same figure as a "wrinkled, sharp-chinned" 
old woman. Does he mean that every figure with marked 
signs of extreme old age is incapable of beauty, and that good 
genre and portrait-painting fall outside beautiful art except 
in as far as they happen to deal with youthful and graceful 



1 P. 33. 



2 See p. 14 supra. 



P. 40. 



4 P. 36. 



IDEALIZATION OF THE UGLY. 



405 



subjects ? I believe that he does mean something of this 
kind in the main, and so far shows himself to be on a low 
level of aesthetic insight. But there are cases in which real 
ugliness — the perversion of characteristic function — has been 
introduced into art by great masters, and of these the author's 
theory is true. He gives well-known examples from Paul 
Veronese's Marriage in Cana. And he also instances the 
phenomena of dissonance, which, as dissonance presupposes 
musical sound (a true dissonance can hardly be recognised in 
natural noises), may be taken as having an element of artificial 
or intentional perversion which causes them to verge upon 
real ugliness. Such actual perversions, or contradictions usurp- 
ing the place of characterization, do seem to demand a quanti- 
tative subordination, or submergence in a mass of beauty, and 
cannot be made independent objects of art by any force or 
depth of presentation. I take it that music could not be 
made with nothing but discord, nor could the nauseating de- 
tails introduced by Veronese in the Marriage in Cana be the 
subjects of independent pictures. So far Rosenkranz seems 
on firm ground. Our complaint of him is not that he denies 
independent aesthetic value to the extreme perversions in art, 
but that he does not appear to distinguish them with certainty 
from the incomparably greater range of the quaintly, rudely, 
grotesquely, terribly or intricately characteristic, all of which 
passes in common parlance as ugly. 

His second answer has deeper import. The ugly, he says, 
when it appears in art, must not indeed be beautified, for this 
would be to intensify its hideousness by adding fraud to re- 
bellion ; but yet it must be "idealized" by subjection to the 
general laws of beauty, for example to the laws of symmetry, 
harmony, proportion, and force of individual expression. 1 The 
result of such idealization is not to soften or disguise its uodi- 
liness, but just the reverse, namely to accent its characteristic 
and essential lineaments. 2 But yet in doing so there must 
arise a certain negative consequence. Unessential matters of 
painful or sickening detail are crushed out, just as in the re- 
presentation of commonplace beauty unessential fascinations 
are crushed out. It is not the desire for fraudulent palliation, 
but the despotism of the fundamental meaning, that operates 
with this effect. 



1 P- 44- 



2 P. 43- 



406 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



It is plain that we have here a strange intermediate posi- 
tion assigned to the ugly in art. Three suggestions force 
themselves upon us in consequence. 

a. If, as we have maintained throughout, the aesthetic per- 
ception of nature differs only in degree from the aesthetic per- 
ception which is art, must not the same reservations be read 
back into the doctrine of ugliness in nature, which are here 
applied to the ugly as it appears in art ? 

b. The province of apparent ugliness or of what we might 
call the difficult in beauty, which hardly fulfils the author's 
definition of ugliness but appears to be excluded by him from 
the beautiful, is thus nearly reconciled with the beautiful in 
substance though not in name ; for when idealized in the 
sense required it would simply resolve itself into cases of the 
characteristic beautiful subject to the laws of abstract or formal 
expression, in virtue of which latter, through assuming strong 
and significant form and structure, it becomes pleasing even 
to the decorative sense. 

c. It must even be doubted whether ugliness according to 
the author's definition, the positive negation of beauty, can 
submit to the idealization he describes without being undone 
as ugliness and presented as beauty. A contradiction, con- 
fessed and explained, is no longer a contradiction ; and the 
perversion of character or individuality revealed and stig- 
matised in its true light and relations, ceases to be a positive 
perversion. The essential distinction is that which Rosen- 
kranz seems to have firmly grasped, between idealization 
as intensifying the lineaments of perversion and emphasizing 
their core and essence in vigorous presentation, and idealiza- 
tion as fraudulently softening and disguising their character 
by causing them to approximate to a type of beauty, in which, 
whether in another sense beautiful or no, they cannot possibly 
have any share. This all-important distinction will occupy 
us again. 

The Forms of x i i- A word remains to be said upon the forms 
opposition. Q f opposition by which the entire discussion is 
determined. 

Ugliness, we saw, is the negation 1 of beauty, or, as nega- 
tion per se can take no sensuous form, we prefer to call it the 
perversion of beauty, whose constituent elements are perverted 



1 "Negation" or " Negativ-Schdnes" pp. 7, 10, 61. 



FALSEHOOD AND NEGATION. 



407 



(verkehrte) in it. Now the term " opposite" (" Gegensatz " or 
" Gegentheil" ) by which he often describes the relation 
between the qualities forming an antithetical pair, is a very 
appropriate term for positive negations or perversions in their 
relation to one another, but it is not a term which explains 
itself apart from a complete exposition of the nature of the 
series or classification in which it is employed. And ac- 
cordingly we find an almost ludicrous confusion in the usage 
of these terms by the aesthetic writers with whom Rosenkranz 
deals. Thus " the true opposite (" Gegensatz ") of the sublime 
is not the ugly as Ruge and K. Fischer say, nor the comic, 
as Vischer thinks, but the pleasing (" gefdllige ")." ] 

The first thing then that Rosenkranz has in his mind is 
that the negative opposition in which each form of the ugly- 
stands to its corresponding form of the beautiful must be 
distinguished from the " positive opposition" in which each 
species 2 of the beautiful stands to one or more of the others. 

This is a step towards clearness, but needs further elucida- 
tion. All definite opposition is between positives negatively 
related, and these epithets, " positive " and "negative," mark 
no distinction prima facie between kinds of opposition. 
Strictly speaking, opposition can only arise between judg- 
ments, for any two given contents are simply different, and 
only become opposed in as far as they may be considered to 
be candidates for the same place. Moreover, it must be noted 
that all common logical opposition is interchangeable ; that is 
to say, when B is the opposite or negation of A, then A is 
also and in the same sense the opposite or negation of B. If 
the one is, then the other is not ; but we are not informed, by 
the mere fact of opposition, which is to stand and which is to 
fall. We must beware of confusing falsehood and negation. 
No ordinary logical symbols or technical terms will represent 
falsehood or confusion of relations. W e must therefore state 
the whole matter more distinctly. 

In the first place the beautiful and the ugly seem to be 
regarded as two co-ordinate genera under the conception 
aesthetic, which genera are so related that to every species of 
the one there corresponds a species of the other formed by 
a false attribution of elements present in the former species. 
But if so, while no doubt it is the case that logically speaking 



1 P. 61. 



2 P. 63, see above p. 402 for these species. 



4oS 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



the beautiful is a positive opposite of the ugly, just as the ugly 
is of the beautiful, yet this purely logical relation, being inter- 
changeable, does not adequately describe their connection. 
W e must therefore understand that the one genus is repre- 
sented by some such symbol as " A is x y," the other by a 
symbol involving self-contradiction such as "A is x r y r ," which 
really belong to A,, and not to A. Granting this explanation, 
we then have two sets of "oppositions"; the opposition 
between each form of the true series and the corresponding 
form of the false series, and the oppositions between the 
different terms of the true series (disregarding those between 
the different terms of the false series). Now in the former 
case, the terms being given in pairs, it is possible to speak of 
" the opposite " of any given term, although it may not be self- 
evident where this opposite is to be found, that is, how the 
pairs of terms are to be arranged, and it is also possible that 
one term may have two or more opposites, even though its 
peculiar counterpart is its opposite par excellence. In fact, 
Rosenkranz opposes the sublime to the petty, mean or frivo- 
lous, w T hereas I should have primarily opposed it to the false 
sublime — the portentous, monstrous, or exaggerated. No 
doubt in different senses it may be "opposite" to either of 
these species of the ugly, — to the latter, I should have said, 
in the stricter sense, as that which arises by mistake out of the 
sublime itself, to the former no doubt as to something very 
far removed from the nature of the sublime, being in fact as I 
think the true opposite of the pleasing or pretty, which is for 
Rosenkranz the opposite par excellence of the sublime in the 
beautiful series. 

For we must consider also the opposition between the 
forms of the beautiful. Now these are ex hypothesi a 
series comprising three or more types, which may be multi- 
plied at pleasure by refinement of analysis. Therefore there 
is no meaning in speaking of the "opposite" of any form 
within the series unless and until we determine what we mean 
by opposition par excellence within such a series. Rosenkranz 
seems to take it that according to an old definition the oppo- 
sites are the most divergent species under the same genus, 
and so opposes the sublime to the pleasing. But plainly the 
whole thing is a question of degree, and if there is to be a 
" simple beautiful "—a conception which I view with some 
suspicion — the sublime must certainly be opposed to it. No 



IDEAL-REALISM. 



409 



doubt Rosenkranz is influenced by remoteness in opposing 
the sublime to the petty in ugliness, just as in opposing it to 
the pleasing in beauty. But it seems that, as between beauty 
and ugliness, the only security for any approach to an objec- 
tive classification is to pair off the genuine form with the form 
which represents a mistaken feeling for that genuine form, 
and, as between the forms of beauty, there is little use in 
speaking of pairs of opposites par excellence, the important 
matter being to establish a fairly representative series, from 
which the kinds and degrees of opposition can then be read 
off with genuine significance. 

The later objec- 3. In including under the term "Objective 
tive idealism Realism" the views of Carriere, Schasler and 
Hartmann, I am not following the phraseology of these writers 
themselves. Carriere designates his own standpoint as that of 
Ideal- Realism, 1 and Schasler 2 accepts this same term, or 
"the synthesis of Idealism and Realism," as the description 
of his aesthetic principle. Hartmann includes the views of 
these two writers with those of Hegel, Vischer, and others 
under the title of concrete idealism, which he also claims for 
his own theory. He assigns to Schelling, Schopenhauer, 
Solger, Weisse, and Lotze, the position of abstract idealists, 
from their common tendency to speak in a pseudo-Platonic 
manner (which Hartmann takes to be genuinely Platonic 3 ) 
of a super-sensuous world of ideas or patterns by approxima- 
tion to which and in no other way the sensuous world 
possesses beauty. It is an essentially true remark 4 of Hart- 
mann, though not literally correct, when in justifying his 
distinction between the abstract and the concrete idealists, 
he urges that the Idea of Beauty ("Idee dcr Schdnheit ") 
of which Weisse and Lotze constantly speak, could have 
absolutely no meaning for Hegel. For according to him 
"the idea" or concrete world-movement becomes beautiful 
when expressed to sense-perception or fancy, and in this 
aspect may be called the "ideal" or perhaps for the sake 
of brevity "the beautiful" ; but Hegel could never speak of 
the idea of beauty in the sense of a beauty which existed as 
a super-sensuous idea. 5 Of course again the conception or 



1 sEsth., ii., Preface. 2 K. G. d. A., pp. 1125 and 1132. 

3 A., i., Pref. vii. 4 A., i. 93 footnote. 

0 Hegel, A., i. 135 and 141, where in fact the term " Idee des Schonen " 



HISTORY OF AESTHETIC. 



notion of beauty employed in aesthetic science is quite dif- 
ferent from an abstract idea with which beauty could be 
identified. 

But I have no doubt that Schelling, though he fell into 
abstract idealism in later years, was next to Schiller and by 
an advance upon Kant the founder of the view that beauty is 
the presentation of the inmost law of things to sense and 
fancy, and for our purpose it will be simplest to omit the 
degrees of abstract and concrete idealism, and to select a term 
which indicates the bond fide endeavour to find beauty in the 
reasonableness of the world displayed to sense. All who have 
genuinely attempted this may fairly be called objective idealists 
in aesthetic. The divergence into abstract monism — which 
ex hypothesi must be dualism — or into abstract idealism, is in 
some degree a matter of defective philosophical expression or 
of over-reliance on emphatic metaphor, and is a confusion 
that partly in appearance and partly in reality has beset the 
very greatest philosophers, including, as is too well known, 
even Plato himself. 

" Ideal- Realism " on the other hand expresses a history or 
a problem rather than a theory or a solution. It indicates a 
combination of two views which have respectively no philo- 
sophical meaning except as universal and exclusive. As it 
stands, therefore, it indicates mere eclecticism. But its 
intention is divined and embodied in the phrase objective 
idealism. 

carriere a ' Carriere published his ^Esthetic in 1859. 

Before the appearance of the third edition in 1886 
he had supplemented it by the splendidly conceived work in 
five volumes (first edition, 1862 ; third edition, 1886), Art 
in the Context of the Evolution of Ctdture, and the Ideals of 
Htimanity; 1 on which I have already drawn in speaking of 
Christian art in its first beginnings. 

Carriere does not make any notable advance in matters of 
principle. Three points may be mentioned on which, whether 
for good or evil, his views are significant. 



does occur, give an absolute justification of Hartmann's meaning. "We 
called (1. c, p. 135) the beautiful the Idea of the beautiful. This means that 
the beautiful itself is to be apprehended as Idea, and that as particularised 
Idea, viz. as Ideal," i.e., " the sensuous show of the Idea/' p. 141. 

1 Die Kunst in Zusammenhange d. Cidtur-entwickelung u. d. Ideate d. 
Menschheit. 



UGLINESS "OVERCOME." 



411 



jkgugjy i- He feels the full importance of Weisse's and 
Rosenkranz's treatment of the ugly. He him- 
self stands on this question between the old and new, and 
although never thoroughly precise and scientific in his expres- 
sion, appears to apprehend the essence of the question more 
justly than the later thinkers. It might be doubted, however, 
whether he sees the full reasons for the view which they 
adopt. 

He attacks Weisse's dialectic progression from the sublime 
through the ugly to the comic, 1 absolutely refusing to conceive 
of the ugly as a kind of the beautiful. In the latest edition 
of his work he is able to comment upon Schasler, whose view, 
shared by Hartmann, that the ugly is an essential element in 
the characteristic and therefore in the beautiful, he no less 
decidedly rejects. The free 2 and the individual we must 
have in beauty, but not the ugly, which is the falsely free 
and individual. I shall return later to this doctrine, with 
which in substance I agree. 

On the place of ugliness in art, however, Carriere agrees 
with Rosenkranz. For the sake of completeness it must be 
admitted, 3 but only either as idealized or as subordinated. It 
is to be noted that in these ways the ugly is said to be " over- 
come," and in its idealization its " repulsiveness " is destroyed. 
Even the case of a noble expression in features that are 
normally ugly is counted under this head, and unrealized 
ugliness — that which cannot stand alone — is yet to submit 
to the laws of the composition in which it is introduced. In 
all this there is a degree of vacillation which shows that the 
limits of " simple beauty" are becoming uncertain, and that 
the admission of the ugly into art will ultimately resolve itself 
into an extension of the frontier of beauty. 
Division of the ii. Carriere arrives 4 at the same general arrange- 
Arts - ment of the arts which Hegel proposed, and to- 
wards which, for different reasons and with many varieties of 
minor detail, aesthetic theory appears to be gravitating. He 
starts from the distinction of co-existence in space and succes- 
sion in time, and their combination in the movement of a life 
and reality that has co-existence as well as succession. These 
three principles are taken to correspond to the " three arts " of 
form, of music, and of poetry. Within each of these "three 



1 A., i. 147. 2 /£ } I4 s. 



3 /A, 159, cf. 162-3. 



/A, i. 625-6. 



412 



HISTORY OF /ESTHETIC. 



arts " there is again a triple distinction. In the " art " of form 
Architecture corresponds to inorganic matter, Sculpture to 
organic individual shape, and painting to the combination of 
the two in individual life. Music is divided as instrumental, 
vocal, and the combination of the two ; poetry into epic, lyric 
and dramatic. The distinctions of "inner perception," accord- 
ing as its object is mind in general, personality as a whole, 
and personality in its particular relations with other persons, 
have to do duty as the basis of division alike for music and 
for poetry. 

The triads thus established within music and poetry appear 
in both cases to rest on distinctions which reverse the order 
of development, and in the case of music also reverse the 
order of artistic scope and capacity. Hegel, though separated 
from the date of Carriere's third edition by more than half a 
century, during which a completely new appreciation of music 
has grown up, yet rightly places pure instrumental music as 
the higher or completer development in comparison with 
"accompanying" music. Wagner is responsible for a ten- 
dency towards art-combinations in the later writers, and per- 
haps also in Carriere. 

Attitude to the n T The larger work on Art in its Connection 
Renaissance. w itk Culture, etc., displays in many ways a more 
genuine conception of aesthetic science than the abstract 
systems, including Carriere's own, which I have ventured to 
characterize as scholastic. A content- theory — and objective 
idealism is essentially a content-theory — must at least indicate 
its relations with the evolution of the content to which it 
refers, and as I have already observed, we do not obtain this 
content in the recorded opinions of philosophers, but only from 
the history of art and civilization. It might, however, be 
possible to indicate these relations without undertaking so 
colossal a task as that of combining a history of civilization 
with a history of art, so that after all the critical points of the 
latter hardly receive the attention which is their due. 

It has been said 1 that the historical division of forms of art 
upon which this work is founded, into oriental, classical,, 
mediaeval, renaissance, and modern, is a great advance upon 
all previous divisions of the kind. I doubt, however, whether 
there is an essential difference between this and Hegel's 



By Hartmann, A., i. 247. 



THE AGES OF ART. 



413 



division, except in as far as modern art is recognised— this 
was a necessary supplement — and the renaissance period is 
distinguished from the mediaeval in a way which indicates an 
antiquated view of the renaissance. But in fact Carriere 
only makes these subdivisions within a wider framework 1 by 
which the whole period from the Christian era to the close 
of the renaissance is thrown into one, under the name of the 
age of feeling (Gemiitli) in opposition to the early oriental and 
classical Greek periods, united within the "age of nature," 
and to the modern time, from the eighteenth century on- 
wards, as " the age of mind." Thus the essential unity of 
Christian art is recognised, though the late development of 
music is not very appropriate to the distinction between the 
age of feeling, to which the classical time of music should 
surely belong, and the "modern" age of mind. The difference 
between oriental art and that of classical Greece is represented, 
not altogether falsely, by a distinction of degrees of perfection 
within the "age of nature." 

It might be suggested as a simpler and more natural arrange- 
ment to start from the distinction of classical, as corresponding 
to a natural monism, romantic as corresponding to a dualism 
of sense and spirit, full of tension arising from the effort to 
bring them together or merge the one in the other, and 
modern as corresponding to a comparatively monistic attitude 
at a higher level than that of Greece, the " two worlds " 
having come together in the concrete import of one. The 
" symbolic" art of Hegel would then appear as a preface or 
introduction — as an essay, essentially imperfect, towards the 
beauty which realized itself in classical Greece. The parallelism, 
which Hartmann suggests, between the relation 2 of symbolic 
to classical, and mediaeval to renaissance, would falsify the 
whole construction. In any such analogy the second pair 
of terms would have to be not mediaeval and renaissance, 
but Christian and modern. But the reality of a modern 
art-period, unless we extend its further limit to include 
Shakespeare whom no dualism seems to affect, is a question 
which does not trouble Carriere as" much as it ought. Let 
us grant that the music of the eighteenth and nineteenth 
centuries is a new and splendid phenomenon in the history of 
art ; yet in relying upon this we are ipso facto admitting a 



Die K u 11st, p. 2. 



2 A., i. 252. 



414 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



certain discontinuity with the older art-world. And we can- 
not, with Carriere, take the generation of Goethe and Schiller 
as an age of abundant poetic production having permanent 
value. Moreover the well-known peculiarities of nineteenth- 
century achievement in art, however magnificent it may have 
been in isolated instances, are such as to make us think twice 
before accepting a "modern" art-age, beginning with the 
eighteenth century, as anything more than a problem and a 
hope. I suspect that the true line of division will be found 
to fall in the sixteenth century, Shakespeare marking a singu- 
larly fortunate transition, and Rubens and Rembrandt the 
beginning of a new period. 

schasier @' Schasler's Critical History of ^Esthetic, dedi- 
cated to Rosenkranz, appeared in 1869. It is an 
immense, but very fresh and readable work, filling 1,200 pages. 
It was intended to be the basis of an aesthetic system, and is 
called "Part I.," but a Part II. commensurate with it has 
never appeared, its place being taken by The System of 
the Arts, 1882, and an " sEsthetic" or outline of the Science 
of Beaiity and Art in 1886. These are works of the size and 
class of our University Extension manuals, and do not add 
much of importance to the views suggested in the Critical 
History. The object-matter of the science has here come 
off second-best in the division of labour that characterizes 
the later idealism, 
conceptions And the observations made above upon the 

indicated by later post-Hegelian writers in general, hold espe- 

the " History." • n r i • i • t • • r • i i 

cially true of this history. Its aim is to furnish the 
critical foundation of a theory of aesthetic, and there is no 
reason to deny its value for this purpose if we clearly under- 
stand of what kind that value must be. The " dialectic," for 
example, which is here exhibited in the progress of philo- 
sophic thought from Plato to Hegel, is the dialectic of a 
branch of the history of philosophy, not the dialectic or cumu- 
lative progress of a kind of apperception in the human intelli- 
gence. The two are connected, and Schasler uses the former 
to elucidate the latter. But we are not here dealing at first 
hand with the causes and nature of changes in aesthetic per- 
ception, as we are in Winckelmann, Schelling, Schiller, Hegel 
and in Carriere's larger work. 

This attribute pervades the whole theory. We are to 
watch, so Schasler te lis us, by means of the critical history, 



CRITICISM OF SCHASLER. 



415 



the intellectual genesis of the aesthetic consciousness. 1 But 
granting that he enables us to do this, what is the nature of 
the outcome ? We see, no doubt, how the aesthetic conscious- 
ness, as a philosophical analysis of the beautiful, draws nearer 
and nearer to completeness. But we are saddened to find 
that as this takes place the aesthetic consciousness, as the 
creative and perceptive enjoyment of beauty, becomes doubtful 
and disturbed. "The modern artist, 2 by reason of the in- 
herent need of reflexion, has for ever forfeited the full and 
free possession of the artist-paradise." We are looking at 
the genesis of a philosophy , but pari passu; we may think, at 
the decay of an art-world. The question is not at present 
how far this may be true, but how far the intellectual process 
which is thus prima facie separable from the art-process is of 
value as an introduction to the study of the latter. The 
change of emphasis from aesthetic to philosophical evolution 
may probably indicate some degree of confusion in the author's 
view. If he means that the true aim of art is only coming 
into sight as beauty for beauty's sake becomes an explicit 
purpose, he commits a very serious blunder, and inverts the 
relations of the art- ages of the world. 

o 

But so again the "Ideal-Realism" which is for him the 
result of the whole evolution, is not a principle or property of 
art or beauty, but a method of aesthetic science. 3 Realism for 
him indicates, historically speaking, what we have called 
"exact aesthetic," the aesthetic of Herbart and Schopenhauer. 
It has no connection with Realism or Naturalism in art as we 
understand it to-day. 

In order to strengthen my grounds for differing sharply and 
widely, from so gifted and eminent a writer as the author of 
the critical history, I feel bound to add to some comments 
which I have already passed upon a kind of hastiness and 
perversity that I find in him, another indication of a careless 
or biassed procedure. 

He has an aesthetic theory of colour of his own/ founded 
upon the theories of Goethe, which he maintains, though 



1 K. G.d. A., i. 61. 

2 lb., i. xxxii. 

3 See Hartmann, i. 248. His criticism here seems perfectly just. Schaslers. 
" realism " in fact means Induction. 

4 jEsth.j i., 78 ; see K. G.d. A. i. 495. 



4t6 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



needing some modification, to be thoroughly justified as 
against the Newtonian analysis. If such ideas were scarcely 
pardonable in Hegel more than fifty years before, what is to 
be said of them in a writer for whom not even national bias 
could any longer be an excuse ? I do not complain that he 
is unacquainted with the work of English physicists, but 
surely he might have studied Helmholtz. 1 



1 The weak point of his theory on purely aesthetic ground is that the 
suggestion of warmth in colour, on the unequal combination of which with 
luminosity he lays stress in determining the aesthetic character of colours, 
cannot be directly obtained as he assumes, from the actual heating powers of the 
various coloured rays. More complex suggestions than this must be brought 
in. In any case it is hopeless to suppose that anything more can be done 
for aesthetic with Goethe's theory than with the accepted analysis. See Helm- 
holtz, Lectures, i. 29. 

I may insert here two kindred points, which are not of sufficient importance 
to be treated in the text, though they bear strongly on the question of judg- 
ment and accuracy. 

He cites quite incorrectly, and without a reference, one or other, I cannot 
tell which, of the familiar passages in which Hegel alludes, with a passing 
tinge of irony, to the use of the term "philosophy" in England. The pass- 
ages are Gesch. d. Philosophic, i. 37, and (shorter) Logic, p. 13 (E. Tr. Wallace, 
p. 11), and though too long to extract they are worth turning up in com- 
parison with Schasler, p. 1158, if we want to measure the difference between 
a great mind and a critic in search of an ill-natured joke. Hegel's interest is 
in both cases serious. In one he quotes from the practice of German uni- 
versities a trace of the ancient meaning of " philosophy," the survival of 
which he is noting in England. And both passages end with an observation, 
plainly aimed at the public familiar to him, to the effect that in England 
philosophy is at least a name for something that people value. 

More closely bearing on our subject is another extravagance of our author. 
In quoting Dickens' Hard Times for the sake of its attack upon English 
" common sense," he altogether fails to discern that, just and good as are in 
many ways the ideas of that delightful story, yet on the specifically aesthetic 
question of fact and fancy Dickens is attacking his own side and the principles 
which are the source of all that is greatest in his own and every other art. 
This phenomenon will surprise no student. The typical scene of Hard Times 
on this point is the school scene which parodies an inspector's attempt to 
bring home to the children the relation of imagination to reality. In 1856, 
the year in which the novel appeared, there appeared also the 4th edition of 
the 2nd vol. of the Modem Painters, containing an account of the Penetrative 
Imagination^ and the first edition of the 4th vol. containing (p. 331) the 
words, " Be assured of the great truth — what is impossible in reality is ridic- 
ulous in fancy." I hold no brief for the Science and Art Department. We 
all know its defects. But it is absolutely plain that the movement, going 
back to 1835, in which it originated, was a form of the movement for a return 
to nature and life in education, with which Dickens, if he had understood its 
real scope, would have heartily sympathised. 



THE UGLY AS A STIMULUS. 4 I 7 



ii. Schasler states his theory of ugliness ex- 
Modifications of pi icitly in the ^Esthetic, 1 referring, at the same 
tne Beautiful. t j m( ^ to p assa ges in the History, to which, in 

principle, his later exposition adds nothing. 

Starting from the researches of Rosenkranz, and agreeing 
with him so far as concerns the position of ugliness outside 
the world of art and beauty, and corresponding to it phase for 
phase, he also acquiesces in the traditional view as to the 
wide range of the ugly in the works of nature. But he 
attempts to strike out a new principle in dealing with ugliness 
where it enters, or is absorbed in, the sphere of art. 

The ugliness, indeed, of bad or false art, a case on which 
Schasler well insists, falls under the first-mentioned head of 
ugliness outside true art, of which it is the strongest example. 
In regard to it, therefore, we have no more to say, except to 
indicate here and there in passing how it is supposed to arise 
by the derangement of relations within genuine art. 

It is with reference to the ugly within the beautiful that 
Schasler has a new view to propound. 

The ugly, he believes, essentially enters into all beauty 
whatever; and more than this, is the active element or dialectic 
negation by which aesthetic interest is impelled to the creation 
of definite or characteristic beauty in its various forms. I find 
it difficult to explain this view further, without entering upon 
a criticism of it. This it is more convenient to defer till 
Hartmann's ideas, which are in principle the same as 
Schasler's, are also before us. The comparison, how r ever, 
of the ugly to the negative, reiterated allusions to the lines in 
Faust which attribute creative impulse to the Spirit that denies, 
and repeated comparisons of the ugly with the false and the 
wicked as essential manifestations of freedom and therefore 
not to be held deplorable phenomena, give us some clue to 
the author's meaning. He distinctly denies the view of 
Rosenkranz, that in entering into art, as demanded by the 
" idea" for the sake of completeness, the ugly remains ugly. 
On the contrary, qua an element in the characteristic, it is 
absorbed in the special and definite form of beauty which has 
in each case arisen in consequence of the stimulus that it gave. 
The contrast of masculine and feminine beauty is always in 



1 Pp. 19-24 referring to the K. G.d.A., pp. 795, 763, 1021-4, 1028, 
1036-8. 

E E 



4i8 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



Schasler's mind. He feels that such sharply opposed forms 
of the beautiful contain elements which a little dislocation 
would make ugly. And he is confident, and with justice, that 
such sharply antagonistic forms there are and ought to be, 
and that for example the ideal of a human type in which 
sexual differences should disappear, favoured by some late 
Greek art and by Winckelmann, is a wholly false ideal. He 
points out that the characteristic qualities or features of either 
sex, if transferred as primary characteristics to the other sex, 
would at once become ugly. 

He is thus obviously relying @n the undeniable and impor- 
tant fact that the positive modifications of beauty, such as the 
sublime and the graceful, are negatively related to each other. 
He also thinks that the works of nature, as normally perceived 
(this condition may save the truth of his view), are widely and 
generally defective in beauty. He appears then to be infer- 
ring that the selection and characterization of definite content 
in suitable form by art or aesthetic perception is, to begin with, 
stimulated by defect of beauty in that which by immediate 
presentation suggests this idealizing process. And further, 
he maintains, if 1 understand him rightly, that the character- 
istic creation so produced, is by its exclusive or special charac- 
terization (as of sublimity, austerity, or the like), ipso facto 
forfeiting some elements of the beautiful which are accessible 
both to a more simple and also to a co-ordinate type of beauty. 
Thus both by "concretion" against the abstract, and by 
divergence against the equally concrete, ugliness asserts 
itself as a factor, but a latent or absorbed factor, in the degrees 
and types of beauty. The only modifications of beauty which 
Schasler recognises are the sublime and the graceful. These 
divisions plainly correspond, as Cicero pointed out, to mascu- 
line and feminine beauty. It may not be worth while to sub- 
divide the content further, but it would be easy to do so, and 
Hartmann does it in great detail. 

The above theory of ugliness is suggestive, and undoubtedly 
opens the way for larger ideas of beauty, by definitely giving 
the characteristic its place as the central fact of beautiful ex- 
pression. I shall criticise it in treating of Hartmann. 

The beauty of art passes over into ugliness either by a 
confusion between two phases of beauty such as the sublime 
and the graceful, 1 or by the intensification of some characteristic 

1 As Schasler says K. G. d. A., 1022 of the father of gods and men repre- 
sented as dancing in Offenbach's Orpheus, " the gracefuller, the uglier." 



THE DOUBLE AND TRIPLE DIVISIONS. 



419 



till it destroys the harmony of the system to which it belongs 
and becomes caricature. Thus the monstrous or horrible is 
the false sublime, and so on. Such are the points at which the 
latent ugliness within art passes into actual and invincible 
ugliness outside art. 

me classification iii- " As regards 1 the principle of division to 
oftneArts. usec [ j n classifying the arts, it need here only 
be remarked that the author, in fundamental contrast with all 
the above-named writers on aesthetic (Hegel, Weisse, and 
Vischer), bases it on the simple antithesis of rest and 
motion ; an antithesis which of course can also be regarded 
as that of ' Matter and Mind,' or ' Material and Form,' or 
'Space and Time,' but, more carefully considered, lies at the 
root of all these antitheses. Now on this antithesis the author 
founds an arrangement of the arts as a strictly articulated 
double series, whose corresponding terms form a coherent 
parallelism. If Hegel, Weisse, and Vischer found themselves 
obliged to assume a triple arrangement, and carried it out, each 
of them in a quite different way, but with the greatest show 
of consistency, by help of the dialectic method — which herein 
displayed a really admirable elasticity — it seems that these 
thinkers were chiefly forced to their conclusion by a fatal gap 
in the parallelism, which with every effort they were unable 
to fill. It is obvious, that is to say, that if, like the naive 
ancients, we arrange the arts according to their means of pre- 
sentation and organs of perception, and designate one group 
as ' arts of the eye ' (Architecture, Sculpture, Painting), and 
the other group as 'arts of the ear' (Music, Poetry), it is 
possible to co-ordinate the two series, so that music corresponds 
to architecture, and poetry to painting ; but then there seems 
to be no kind of art on the other side corresponding to sculp- 
ture and comparable with it. This fatal gap was an awkward 
blot in the system, the true articulation of which was other- 
wise plain." 

" As will be seen later from the development of the prin- 
ciple of division, the author has adhered to the double arrange- 
ment as the only rational and natural one ; and what prin- 
cipally urged him to this course — besides the inner necessity 
of the notion — was the fact that in the triple division no room 
was to be found for a very essential grade in the evolution of 



1 K. G. d. A., i. xxv. (Preface). 



420 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



the notion of beauty, viz. the mimic rhythm of the moving 
form. For if, with Schlegel, we consent to designate architec- 
ture as frozen music, we might with far more justice designate 
sculpture as the frozen mimicry of form, or the dance (panto- 
mimic representation, of course not in a comic sense), as un- 
frozen sculpture." 

This division involves at first sight two principles, 1 one the 
principle of simultaneity and succession which distinguishes 
the two series from one another, and the other, specifically 
stated in the System d. Kiinste, the principle of increasing 
difference in weight (" Gewicht" 1 predominance or importance), 
of material and idea, which distinguishes the several arts within 
each of the series. These two principles Schasler reduces to 
one by a lax argumentation identifying both of them with 
the antithesis of rest and motion, which embodies as he thinks 
the essence of the whole set of antitheses, " Matter and 
Force — Material and Shape — Nature and Mind." 3 The " re- 
duction" of these profound antitheses to one of their most 
external and abstract results is a bad point of departure for 
the appreciation of the concrete value of the fine arts. 

On this classification and its principle I make three observ- 
ations. 

The Parallelism. a. The whole parallelism 4 appears fantastic. 

I see no antecedent desirability in creating two series at all 
or in the correspondence of arts which Schasler thinks essen- 



1 Discussed in Schasler's System d. Kiinste, p. 236. 

2 In distinguishing sculpture from painting he seriously means weight, 
(" Schivere" System d> K., p. 80). There is therefore an equivocation in the use 
of the word " Gewicht " all the more objectionable that a certain meaning in 
the phrase can be detected, and would have repaid explanation. 

3 S. d. K., p. 256. 

4 I subjoin Schasler's scheme as printed p. 124 of the System d. Ki'mste. 

I. Hauptgruppe : II. Hauptgruppe : 

Kiinste der " simultanen " Perception : Kiinste der "successiven" Perception : 

a) Productive : b) Re-productive 
(Hilfs-) Kiinste : 

1. Architektur 1. Musik — Virtuosenthum. 

2. Plastik " . 2. Mimik — Mimische Darstellung. 

/Landschaftsmalerei. subj. \ Lyrik — Deklamation. 

. J Genremalerei . . . obj. 3. Poesie L Epik — Rhapsodik. 

3. Malereij Historienmalerei. .subj. Dramatik— Schauspielkunst. 

obj. 



FALSE CORRESPONDENCES. 



421 



tial. The only justification for the plan would be that some 
definite and essential relations were symbolized by the 
parallelism. In any case, no doubt there is something of a 
break between painting and music. But it is a break which 
must be traversed in a definite direction. No help is got by 
throwing music wholly out of its historical position, which is 
also that taken by it on an impartial survey of its powers and 
tendencies, and beginning with it a new series in which the 
fact of the fresh beginning remains wholly unexplained in its 
relation to the close of the other series. The distinction by 
eye and ear is broken down when mimic dancing is placed in 
the second group. The distinction by rest and motion is 
compatible with such an arrangement only in the most super- 
ficial sense. Motion is not the medium or element of this 
so-called art, but merely a modification by gesture of the 
human figure and inseparably attached to its spatial reality. 

The detailed correspondences are not less wild. No doubt 
the definite though very narrow resemblances between music 
and architecture were worth noting once for all. Neither of 
these arts is primarily imitative, and both depend largely on 
rhythmical intervals which can be numerically represented. 
But when this is said, all is said. The inseparable combina- 
tion of time-relation and tone-relation which is, as I under- 
stand, the essence of melody, finds little or nothing in 
architecture to answer to the tone-relations ; while the 
refinements of harmony and orchestration, which are but 
faintly foreshadowed in the subtlest colour-combinations 
known to the painter's art, have nothing at all corresponding 
to them in architecture. For if its coexistent rhythmical 
intervals have already been compared to melody, they must 
not be used over again in a lax comparison with harmony. 
On the other hand, the organic decorative form to which 
architecture presses forward finds no genuine analogy in 
music. Of the mimic dance in comparison with sculpture I 
will speak separately. The correlation of lyric, epic and 
dramatic poetry, with landscape, genre and historical painting, 
can only throw the reader into amazement. Landscape paint- 
ing, as we know to-day, demands the highest characteristic 
objectivity of expression, and only through this attains its 
measure of subjectivity. Lyric poetry does not demand and 
can hardly, in spite of recent developments, receive a fully- 
organized characteristic content. Genre-painting, though good 



4^2 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



in its place, is, for the reason pointed out by Hegel, 1 essentially 
trifling in scale, and cannot have the large and grand style 
which is the essential of the epos. While historical painting, 
if in genuine art there is such a category at all (implying, as it 
seems to, a historical, i.e. non-aesthetic interest, instead of an 
aesthetic interest in the presentation of a content which 
happens to be suggested by history) involves a relation to 
mere fact wholly alien to the drama. Moreover, the un- 
criticised inclusion of the three traditional types of poetry as 
essential forms of art, in a place subsequent to music and 
correlative with painting, without the smallest indication 
that two out of the three have apparently ceased to exist, and 
the third is fundamentally changing its character, displays in 
a striking form the difficulties that attach to an entire dissocia- 
tion of aesthetic from the temporal evolution of beauty. 

The Mimic b. About the mimic dance very little need be 
Dance. ga&d, for Schasler all but confesses the absurdity 
of the position which he assigns it, 2 which is not redeemed by 
the suggestion that it bears an epic character in contrast to 
the essentially lyrical character of music. 

I only desire to take the opportunity of pointing out a 
principle which appears to me to determine many questions 
with reference to the secondary arts, though it does not apply 
to the true decorative or "minor" arts. A true aesthetic 
material, in which ideas or emotions are to be freely symbol- 
ized, is the better indeed for definite and peculiar properties, 
but must not have in itself any individualized organization. 
Such an organization cannot but collide with any expression, 
in producing which it is to be treated as mere material. 
Organisms and individuals are bad material for the artist 
to work with. In landscape gardening, as in acting or the 
mimic dance, there is a collision between the natural indi- 
vidual and the homogeneous unity demanded by the idea. 
The work cannot be made in one piece under the dominion 
of one spirit. In a lesser degree the same applies to objects 
represented as well as to the material of representation. 
Flowers, trees, animals are manageable in landscape, but 
represented for their own sake they impose their individuality 
on the artist, not having, like man, a complete spirituality of 
their own, yet refusing to be recast in the spirituality of his 



In his defence of Dutch painting. 



2 S. d. K, 105. 



NEGLECT OF THE MATERIAL. 



mood. They remain, therefore, as a rule, more or less in the 
region of studies. 

Thus I hold it absurd in principle to speak of the mimic 
dance as fluid or unfrozen sculpture. In sculpture the whole 
form is re-created by a single spirit in a single homogeneous 
material. In acting or the mimic dance the individual is and 

o 

remains a given natural form, which is determined first by 
nature and then by its own intelligence and feeling, and can 
never in principle, however great its capacities, begin to fulfil 
the condition of a homogeneous medium cast into a single form 
as the expression of a single idea. The approximation of the 
dance to an art is nearest where the lowest place, that of mere 
decorative combination, is claimed, and where the individual 
form does little, and is only a unit in a pleasing pattern of 
motions. 1 

c. Another refinement has told with disastrous 

Tlie Material. rr o 1 i > • r r i i 

ertect on bchaslers appreciation of a fundamental 
principle of artistic expression. The material of art, Schasler 
insists, 2 is the marble or the paint ; the 7iieans or medium, of 
representation is the perceived form and colour. In music 
and poetry, of course, material and medium all but coincide. 
But where they are separable the material tends to be omitted 
from consideration in favour of the medium ; even Schasler's 
reference to its weight, in his distinction of the arts, comes 
to lack justification, and Hartmann, accordingly, objects to it. 

Thus the whole range of considerations that attach to 
the feeling for material, and to the moulding of fancy by 
the habit of thinking in a certain material, are omitted. 3 
No attention is paid to the " minor " arts, in which the 
differences of treatment spring obviously and directly from 
the differences of material, and from love and experience, for 
example, of the "metal," 4 as it is alive in the workman's 



1 See above, p. 208, Hogarth's comparison of the " stick and ribbon orna- 
ment" to a country dance. 

2 S. d. K., ch. 2. 

3 6". d. K., 60. " The form which it (the marble) possesses as a natural 
substance, i.e. its external stratification and inner texture, has nothing to do 
with the form given it by sculpture." If he had compared it with wood and 
bronze he could never have said this. 

4 i.e. In this case the melted glass. W. Morris, "The Lesser Arts of Life " 
in Lectures o?i Art by Poole, Morris, and others, p. 196. "In the hands of 
a good workman the metal is positively alive, and is, you may say, coaxing 
him to make something pretty." 



HISTORY OF AESTHETIC. 



hands ; and thus the only true analogy for the classification of 
the " higher" arts is hopelessly lost. Yet even through music 
and poetry the same relation persists. The musician thinks, 
we are told, in the tones of particular instruments, and writes 
w r ith the colour and feeling proper to each. Even the poet 
must have the feeling of a familiarity with his material, and 
his attempts and achievements cannot be the same in Greek 
and Latin, in Italian and in German, in French and in 
English. 

I am confident that except through this recognition of the 
workman's sympathy with his material, a recognition which 
Hegel in some degree possessed, and which recent English 
criticism has much more completely expounded, nothing solid 
and sane can be done in the classification of the arts. 

I have unavoidably laid stress on points in which I differ 
from Schasler. His very clearness and freshness of style 
make his errors glaring in the eyes of those who think that 
they are errors. But with all his prejudices and caprices he 
stands on the true ground of modern aesthetic. He is the first 
to accept the principle that elements which may readily become 
difficult and displeasing, are not only permissible but essential 
in art, and are so essential because of their being involved in 
that penetrating idealization which is the central attribute of 
the beautiful, and which is recognised by him in all its depth 
under the name of the characteristic. 
„ y. Hartmann, who combines the conclusions of 

Hartmann. „ ' . • i i i • • r 

bchopenhauer with the substantive views ot 
Hegel, and has attained a European popularity equalled 
among recent philosophers only by that of Mr. Herbert 
Spencer, has produced as his fourth principal work, following 
upon the Philosophy of the Unconscious, the Ethic, and the 
Philosophy of Religion, a comprehensive treatise on aesthetic 
(1886). Like Schasler's system as originally projected, it 
consists of two parts, the first historical and the second purely 
theoretical. The historical part is confined to "German 
aesthetic from Kant onwards " ; the second portion is entitled 
" a Philosophy of the Beautiful," and fills 836 pages, as com- 
pared with 582 of the first part. This ratio compares signifi- 
cantly with Schasler's 1200 pages of history, followed only 
by theoretical works on a smaller scale. Moreover, within 
the first part, Hartmann deals in separate essays, partly 
historical and partly critical, with detached questions in 



NEGLECT OF HISTORY. 



4^5 



aesthetic theory — a very valuable treatment, but one which 
yet further diminishes the space allotted to pure history, 
significance of i- 1 begin by noting that Hartmann refuses to 
the mstory. j ea j ^-{fa the aesthetic of the ancients. Though 
admitting the historical interest of such studies, he considers 
that the "Aristotelian principle of imitation'* and the " Platonic 
abstract idealism " are rightlv held to be of no further moment 
for aesthetic theory : while Aristotle's Poetic, owing to Les- 
sing's glorification of it, has still an undeserved reputation, 
and Plato's obscure indications of aesthetic views are obviously 
not worth the emphasis that is laid upon them. 

This is only part of the author's general opinion that the 
historical and philological interest prevalent at the Universi- 
ties leads to an over-estimate of the value of ancient philo- 
sophy in general, as of ancient aesthetic in particular. 1 

In presence of this view, which as regards the pure theory 

of aesthetic has much in its favour, it seems desirable to point 

out a fundamental distinction. Granting for the sake of argu- 
es _o 

ment, what I cannot here discuss, that the work of ancient 
philosophy is fully absorbed in modern thought, and that for 
scientific completeness, at least in the theory- of beauty, it is 
sufficient to start from eighteenth- and nineteenth - centurv 
researches, there is still a question as to the obligation im- 
posed upon a content-theory by the peculiar nature of the 
matter with which it deals. Art, like philosophy, is a na- 
tional and historical product and cannot be adequately treated 
with the complete formal detachment with which exact science 
approaches its objects. Thus I might not so much miss the 
treatment of Greek aesthetic theory if I found in its place an 
appreciation of what beauty was for the Greeks. This we 
get. though at second-hand, in M tiller's. Schasler's or Zimmer- 
mann's history of aesthetic philosophy, as we get it at first 
hand in Winckelmann's, Schelling's, Hegel's, or Goethe's 
treatment of Greek art. But bv omitting the aesthetic and 
not inserting the art, Hartmann has dropped out half the con- 
tent of the science, being inveigled into doing so through the 
notion, fostered by histories of aesthetic opinion, that Greek 
philosophy came into the subject only for the sake of its pure 
contributions to theory. Now really, the introduction of 
Greek theorv into aesthetic science in a historical form was a 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



survival of the treatment of the Greek sense of beauty as an 
integral part of the object-matter, and taken as a clarified 
expression of that sense had value at once as theory and as 
content. 

The facility with which this integral element of content is 
let go seems to be in fact accounted for by a purely popular 
and naive position assumed by the author in respect of 
modern art. 1 He appears to share the confusion which we 
trace in Schasler, between the abstract and concrete purposes 
of the artist, with the accompanying presumption that be- 
cause modern reflection understands the mission of art better 
than earlier theory, therefore modern art itself is more favour- 
ably situated than that of earlier times. " Only modern art, 
which has broken with all mythology, can approach the 
true aim of art." 2 I have already referred to the problem 
thus raised, especially in my treatment of the Renaissance. 
In its most acute modern phase it is excellently discussed by 
Professor Bryce in his work on The American Common- 
wealth ; 3 much of course must depend on the sense in which 
"modern" art, in this usage contrasted with that of the middle 
age and early Renaissance, is understood, and the time at 
which it is taken to have begun. I have already expressed 
my views upon this question. 4 

But if, as is too plainly the case, the author means to 
represent the course of art as a progress which has continued 
during the last three hundred years 5 in the same sense and 



1 i. 126. 2 lb. 3 Vol. iii. p. 554 ff. 4 P. 413 supra. 

5 See i. pp. 126-7. "Therefore it is only modern art, which has broken 
with all mythology, that can approach the true art-problem, to symbolize for 
sense the human spirit, which in its ideal aspiration knows the divine spirit 
to be immanent in it, through the totality of its ideal moods and actions. 
Against this colossal substantive advance we can make no account of the 
formal difficulties which are opposed to art by the abstract changes and ugly 
externalities of modern life ; it only results that formal beauty must more and 
more give way to characteristic beauty as the ideal content becomes deeper 
and more subtle." ..." All this does not overthrow Hegel's dictum, 
that the ideal content attainable by art is limited by its sensuous vehicle, but 
it reverses Hegel's estimate of the value of ancient, mediaeval [Wm. Morris' 
" modern"], and modern art into the opposite, viz. from a descending [this is 
false as regards Hegel's view of the two first terms] into an ascending series, 
not merely in conformity with content in the general progress of culture, but 
also from the purely aesthetic standpoint which takes account of content only 
in as far as it is adequately symbolized to sense." 



ABSTRACT AND CONCRETE IDEALISM. 



427 



degree with the progress of civil freedom, material prosperity, 
mechanical invention, and the natural and critical sciences, 
then this fundamental error explains his inability to appreci- 
ate the depth of Hegel's insight into the art-forms and art- 
periods, and his indifference to the historical articulation of 
content, outside of which the object-matter of the science of 
aesthetic simply does not exist. 

I now turn to a point in which Hartmann's history has done 
good service. He is the first writer who has distinctly held 
up to view the difference between abstract and concrete ideal- 
ism in the history of aesthetic philosophy, and has thus placed 
the theory of the beautiful on a clear foundation from which 
I believe it will not be dislodged. He points out with great 
acuteness how all subsequent tendencies of German aesthetic 
exist in germ within Kant's C7 r itique of the Power of J ttdg- 
ment, and he distinguishes these tendencies as I.: the /Esthetic 
of Content, including, i. Idealism — abstract from Schelling and 
Schopenhauer to Weisse and Lotze, concrete from Hegel to 
Carriere and Schasler — and ii. the /Esthetic of Feeling as in 
Kirchmann and Horwicz ; II. the /Esthetic of Formalism in 
Herbart and Zimmermann ; and III. Eclecticism in Fechner. 
The distinction which he especially insists on, that between 
concrete and abstract idealism, depends on grasping or not 
grasping the essential doctrine of " ^Esthetic show" \Schein), 
viz. that beauty, though it symbolizes ideas, only exists in the 
concrete forms of sense and fancy, so that in speaking of an 
idea of beauty we are already on slippery ground, and in 
speaking of beauty as having existence in an abstract idea we 
fall into sheer nonsense. 1 And against concrete Idealism, he 
insists, there is really no opposition. All opposition against 
Idealism is founded on the conception of it as abstract ideal- 
ism. In this respect as in others the distinction shares the 
fortunes of that on which in fact it is founded, the logical 
distinction between the abstract and concrete universal. 

In another matter Hartmann has brought against the older 
concrete Idealism one of those useful objections, which though 
they may not be needed to correct the actual thought of a pre- 
vious philosopher, are certainly needed to correct the popular 
interpretation of it. Following Schopenhauer, and especially 
insisting on the views of Trahndorff (a contemporary of Hegel 



See above, p. 409, on Hegel and Hartmann. 



428 



HISTORY OF AESTHETIC. 



whose works I only know through Hartmann) he accuses 
Hegel of an icy intellectualism, and desires to supplement 
his view by that of Trahndorff, who considers beauty as 
" love apprehending itself" 1 — " love " being extended into the 
general sense of a demand for union. " Beauty," Hartmann 
suggests as a definition on the basis of Trahndorff, "is the life 
of love apprehending its own ground and purpose in the idea." 2 
Hegel's first definition is, it will be remembered, that beauty 
is the presentation of truth to sense and fancy. I believe 
that the proposed supplementation is fanciful, just as I believe 
that Schopenhauer's "will" adds nothing to Hegel's "idea." 
A blind impulse is nothing ; and if the unconscious will is 
nothing apart from direction by the unconscious idea, then we 
return after all to the idea as a system of unconscious forces, 
a paradox which we might as well have faced to begin with. 
Hartmann, I think, fails to see that the aesthetic show or 
semblance, just because it is a concrete image reborn of the 
mind, necessarily embodies feeling as well as perception, 
because every concrete utterance of mind, every utterance of 
mind as a whole of sense fused with idea — is stamped into 
what it is by a certain feeling. This is quite plain throughout 
Hegel, especially when love is explained to be the ideal, i.e. 
the essence of concrete expression, in romantic art. But if 
any one could doubt this aesthetic truth, it was well to have it 
made plain. And this service Hartmann has rendered. 

In order to set the matter in the clearest light, he has 
devoted a careful discussion in the systematic treatise 3 to the 
conception of the aesthetic " Schein," pointing out that this 
conception includes the projection of feeling into the object, 
while such a term as " Anschauung " need not suggest this 
inclusion. In the same connection, moreover, he is anxious 
to elucidate the nature of the aesthetic " Schein-gefuhlen," 
or actual though ideal and impersonal feelings roused by 
beauty. This discussion again is clear and helpful, and being 
so, cannot be pronounced superfluous, although it really does 
no more than develop in methodic form what Aristotle, as 
interpreted by Lessing and Bernays, had pointed out with 
reference to the idealization of "fear" through "pity," and 
the reference of aesthetic emotion to the self widened into 
humanity. 



1 Hartmann, Aesth., i. 146 ff. 2 ]b., 148 rT. 3 Aesth., ii. 22. 



ORDERS OF BEAUTY. 429 



Tue degrees * n s P^ te °^ ^ cr iti c i sms which I felt bound 

of Beauty and to make upon Hartmann's conception of the course 
ugnness. aesthetic evolution, it is undeniable that he has 
grasped in intellectual form the general result towards which 
aesthetic philosophy has been gravitating, and according to 
the theory which I have adopted must necessarily gravitate. 
Tne orders of a» He carries out with methodical completeness 
Formal Beauty. fa e conception of " formal beauty " as only a lower 
grade of the beauty that depends upon content, and as passing 
upwards by degrees of concreteness into individual and cha- 
racteristic expressiveness, which not only modifies the more 
abstract and formal elements of expression, but also includes 
and employs them. The "Concretionsstufen," or planes of con- 
creteness, are set out systematically with a far greater scientific 
knowledge and completeness than that shown by Hegel in his 
corresponding account of symmetry, repetition, and the like. 
They comprehend six orders of formal beauty — unconscious 
formal beauty or the sensuously pleasant ; the mathematically 1 
and the dynamically pleasing ; the passively teleological (as 
shown for example in decorative beauty); the vital, bearing of 
course a substantial relation to some of the mathematical and 
dynamical forms ; and last of the "formal" orders, the regular 
or normal type in any species. All these elements of beauty 
are counted as formal, though each of course has one grade 
more of concreteness than that which precedes. Finally there 
comes the concretely beautiful or microcosmically indivi- 
dual, in which there is realized the true essence of beauty 
as characteristic expression. It will be obvious to the reader 
that the definition of beauty laid down in the first chapter of 
the present work, which has served as our guide through the 
evolution of the aesthetic consciousness, is presupposed in this 
arrangement of grades and planes. 

ugliness in b. The treatment of the problem of ugliness, 2 
Nature. which Hartmann shares with Schasler, is en- 
cumbered by a prior difficulty concerning ugliness in nature, 
which I will try to clear away in a few words. Not content 
with bringing relative ugliness into all beauty, Hartmann finds 
real ugliness widely distributed in nature, and in explaining 
this conviction betrays a very serious dualism, corresponding 
to the importance which he falsely attaches to a conscious aim 



The catenary curves are mentioned, p. 112. 



2 Aesth., ii. 142, 501. 



430 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



at beauty as such in art. Nature, he says, is often ugly be- 
cause and in as far as she does not aim at beauty ; often she 
aims at beauty, and then she is beautiful. Now the former 
notion is doubtful, the latter false. Let us put the distinction 
clearly. Art is the better, to our perception at least, for being 
consciously adapted and selected, but not for consciously 
aiming at " beauty for beauty's sake." Beauty is the result of 
rationality expressed for sense ; art aims not at beauty but at 
the best expression of some particular content. So again 
beauty in nature, i.e. in the external world as normally per- 
ceived, is not helped or hindered because natural processes are 
simply causal and exclude a conscious purpose directed to 
beauty. Thus far all is analogous with art. Beauty and 
ugliness are results of the particular modes in which at times 
these causal processes harmonize, or seem to us to interfere, 
with each other, and consequently with the needs of our per- 
ception. The consciousness of art, and the unconsciousness 
of nature are alike in being immersed in particular contents 
which determine them throughout, and an abstract aim outside 
and undetermined by special content is as impossible for the 
former as for the latter. 

But Hartmann appears to regard it as occasionally possible 
for the latter, i.e. for nature. This seems a wild idea. For, is 
nature ever aiming at beauty when she is beautiful ? Cer- 
tainly not. Does Hartmann really believe that the colours of 
birds and flowers have a decorative purpose 1 independent of 
natural selection ? Surely this is an antiquated notion. Their 
purpose, if any can by analogy be ascribed to them, is the 
survival of the species in which they are displayed ; their 
result is beauty, because to our perception they are striking 
or harmonious. The whole opening for characteristic beauty 
in nature, and the possibility of seeing it in the mechanically 
determined forms of water, earth, rock, and vapour is de- 
stroyed by this idle dualism. Nature, we must take it, 
is absolutely logical, and therefore, prima facie, beautiful 
throughout. Individualities and their interference may no 
doubt produce in nature an analogy to ugliness, though it 
is to be remembered that in all development there is some 
interference, even interference which may be called hostile. 2 



1 See p. 242 of Grant Allen's Colour Sense. 

2 The peculiar beauty of the Scotch fir is closely bound up with the sense of 



BEAUTY FOR BEAUTY S SAKE. 



431 



But it is at least possible that the advantage of representative 
art is chiefly in introducing limitations appropriate to our 
powers and knowledge, and in compensating us for them by 
an artificial completeness or microcosmic character. In theo- 
rizing on the ugly of Nature, as we select it, we must bear in 
mind the infinite context from which, in perceiving, we disso- 
ciate it. 

Moreover we do not admit that even in art it is well or 
possible to make beauty as such the guide and purpose. The 
abstraction is empty, and kills all content. The artist or the 
lover of natural beauty must be mastered by something in par- 
ticular, something that lays upon him the necessity of appre- 
ciation or of expression. Though he is conscious, and nature 
is unconscious, yet with him, as with nature, beauty 1 is not a 
purpose but a result. In this w r e see the depth of Goethe's 
aphorism 2 that the principle of art is the significant, the reszdt 
of successful treatment is the beautiful. The principle is what 
guides ; the result is not necessarily the aim. It is very sug- 
gestive in connection with this idea of an abstract aim that 
Hartmann finds it necessary to exclude architecture wholly 
from the free fine arts. 

ugliness in c. " The beautiful of the lower grades suffers 
Beauty. diminution by reason of the laws of form that 
prevail in the higher grades." 3 Thus uniform repetition is 
lost in symmetry, simple bilateral symmetry is lost in the 
subtle balance of a picture, the highest refinements of form, 
it is said, are incompatible with devotion to the more recon- 



resistance and definite strength conveyed by its rugged and broken outline. 
Those who are familiar with the rare sight, only to be seen in sheltered places, 
of fine trees of this species retaining all their branches regularly developed, 
and consequently presenting an unbroken and symmetrical contour, must 
have felt that, splendid as such individuals are, they hardly show the same 
character as the scarred veterans of the hillside. 

1 See Introd. to Hegel's Aesf/i., E. Tr., p. 36. 

2 With all abstract terms there is a difficulty of usage arising from the possi- 
bility of taking them as concrete. A beauty, i.e. a thing which is beautiful, is 
no doubt what the artist yearns to create. But this means, I presume, that 
he has in him a content which cries out to him for full and harmonious ex- 
pression in a certain medium which is suitable to it and has already moulded 
its idea. But just because it is a beauty, it cannot be beauty as such. Ab- 
straction is a sure sign of decadence. Art for art's sake is a silly notion. I 
am not sure that in its root it is not Abstract Idealism of the supposed Platonic 
type. 

3 Hartmann, Aesf/i., ii. 217. 



43 2 



HISTORY OF AESTHETIC. 



dite harmonies of colour, smooth or simple tone-combina- 
tions do not meet the needs of great musicians at their 
greatest, and the normal generic regularity of human linea- 
ments (the so-called Greek or statuesque outline) or the 
uniformity of respectable character must be departed from in 
painting and in the drama in order to reveal fully the beauty 
of individual characterization. 

"Ugliness," 1 then, "is just so far aesthetically justified as 
it is a vehicle of the concretion of the beautiful " (der Kon- 
krescenz des Sckonen). That which is comparatively beautiful 
as against the relatively more abstract beautiful of the lower 
grades, is characteristic as against the other concrete beauties 
of its own level. "The more 2 characteristic any beauty is 
upon its own level, the more serious are the forfeitures which 
it imposes on the beauty of lower levels ; that is, within every 
grade the formal ugliness which is aesthetically indispensable 
is the greater as the beauty is more characteristic." 

Technically, therefore, Hartmann appears to maintain : (i) 
that there is ugliness in all beauty, but not qua ugliness, only 
qua an element in beauty; and (2) that all ugliness is only 
relative, being " the expression of the illogical in a world which 
is essentially logical." 3 The different modes in which, on the 
highest or individual plane, it is " overcome," produce such 
modifications of the beautiful as the touching, the comic, the 
tragic, and the humorous. 

no ugliness in (i) It seems then that the ugliness which nor- 
Beauty. mally enters into beauty is what we may call 
apparent ugliness only, that is to say, a merely relative in- 
tricacy or narrowness which at first sight taxes the inexperi- 
enced perception. It does not seem that to a just appreciation 
it is in fact ever presented as ugliness. This doctrine, nomin- 
ally in polar antagonism to that of Rosenkranz, but practically 
not very different from his, may in general be accepted as a 
conclusive testimony to the width and depth of true beauty, 
in which the strong and the significant play an increasing part 
as the education of the individual and of the race proceeds 
from the formally to the characteristically expressive. 

Taken more in detail, however, the conception arouses a 
certain doubt. Ought the strong and definite to be called 
ugly at all, when it does not assume the shape of a disguised 



1 Hartmann, Aesth., ii. 219. 2 lb., 220. 3 lb., 256. 



UGLINESS IN BEAUTY. 



contradiction in which the part fraudulently claims to be the 
whole ? Mr. Ruskin 1 once said that genuine imagination was 
distinguished by the power of making a right or beautiful 
whole out of ideas that taken apart were wrong or ugly. 
But he has since modified the expression of this view. It is 
plain, indeed, that every definite element readily becomes 
illogical in an improper context. All features of characteristic 
beauty are therefore potentially ugly, and the more so, the 
more they are characteristic. 

The doctrine of a necessary forfeiture as we ascend the 
grades of concreteness is more doubtful, and may be seriously 
misleading. There is, it is true, a fascination in spiritual ex- 
pressiveness superadded to a grave deformity in face or figure. 
But if the theory means that this is the normal type of the 
characteristic, then the theory is false. True ugliness, the 
fraudulent perverse of the beautiful, is not an essential ele- 
ment in the characteristic, though the characteristic has power 
in the last resort to "overcome" even this. But expression 
may be the " flower and native growth" of noble body as of 
noble mind. As in the head of Goethe or of Pericles, it may 
be the natural intensification of vital meaning rising from a 
structure nobly planned throughout. The departure from the 
lines of statuesque regularity, demanded by individualization, 
may — I do not say that it always does — introduce lines and 
colours of greater and not less formal beauty than those laid 
down by the "generic" type. 

And so with the whole set of gradations. It is a truism 
that repetition undergoes a change when it passes into sym- 
metry. It is not so clear that it undergoes a loss. It is a 
truism that bilateral symmetry undergoes a change when it 
passes into the balance of a Turner landscape ; but whether 
it is lost is an arguable question. Without discussing the 
purely logical problem of the meaning of change and loss in 
dialectic, which is merely verbal so far as concerns aesthetic, I 
will merely point out that the theory seems wholly to lose 
sight of the true clue which is also the crux in this question, 
viz. the complete permeation of apparent ugliness by the 
tissue and texture of simple beauty. The point which strikes 
us to-day is not merely how ugliness enters into beauty, but 
how beauty enters into ugliness, as indeed the doctrine of 



1 Mod. Painters, ii. 148 ff. 



F F 



434 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



" planes of concretion " requires, when rightly understood. In 
the great works of great masters, however strange or difficult 
from their intricacy, originality, or profoundness, the deco- 
rative texture is usually more splendid, more harmonious, and 
more lavish in beautiful detail, than is possible in slighter pro- 
ductions if they are not to be oppressed and overloaded. A 
special work has been published dealing with the patterns on 
the robes of the great pictures in our National Gallery, and 
they well deserve it. What decorator ever painted a velvet 
gown like Tintoret, or cut in marble such lines and folds as the 
drapery of the " Fates" in the East pediment of the Parthenon 
— surely the most beautiful block of marble in the world ? What 
composer of ballet-opera can vie with Beethoven in wealth of 
melody ? Are there any verses in the most graceful poems 
of Tennyson that for sheer beauty of sound and rhythm can 
compare with Ugolino's story of the hunger-tower, or with 
the words of Prometheus in his agony, or of Macbeth in his 
despair ? 

The conception of a simple forfeiture of formal beauty by 
all individualization is incompetent to face such questions as 
these. It is by recognising that concrete characterization, 
even though difficult or terrible as a whole, yet gives more 
and not less play to the absolutely indisputable elements of 
formal beauty, that we are first led to conjecture its true place 
in the beautiful world. While the painting of the English 
" pre-Raphaelite " artists still appeared ugly to the common 
taste in England, it happened that among other points, so 
Mr. Ruskin tells us, the critics attacked their perspective in 
particular drawings. Here at last was a plain issue ; Mr. 
Ruskin took his stand upon it, and was able as he conceives 
to show conclusively that on the pure question of correctness 
the critics were mistaken. Such a proof, only affecting rela- 
tions low down among the elements of formal beauty, paves 
the. way for the idea that the art, which is so far correct, may 
have some beauty in it after all. 

What we really have to do with in the whole of this pro- 
blem is an extension of the sense of beauty by which its 
familiar and formal basis is not narrowed but on the contrary 
is both enlarged and fortified. If Hartmann only means that 
the painter can achieve what the sculptor would be mad to 
attempt, that we knew before. If he means that the painter, 
in his more intricate works, loses the balance and harmony of 



INSUPERABLE UGLINESS. 



435 



sculpture, 1 we say, No, it does not follow. We have not 
merely to suggest that a forfeiture of sculptural beauty is in- 
curred by passing on to painting and music, but something 
deeper and wider than this, viz. that all true characterization 
is capable of entering into beauty without essential forfeiture 
of the qualities which have always been known as beautiful. 

(2) Whether there is or is not insuperable 

Real Ugliness. ). > . , , • 1 1 1 

ugliness, i.e. whether some ugliness is absolute and 
some merely relative, or all merely relative, seems to be one 
of those problems in which a difference of degree passes at 
length into a difference of kind. But the important point to 
fix upon is this, that not mere contradiction is the illogicality 
which corresponds to ugliness, but only such contradiction as 
is disguised by fraud or confusion. Exposed contradiction is 
reconciled contradiction ; confusion, the contradiction given as 
a positive existence, is the only genuine falsehood. Therefore 
what we have to dread as ugliness insuperable either by healthy 
perception or by the ' ' characteristic " of art, is not the narrow, 
the rude, the terrible, the grotesque, or even the vicious when 
frankly and forcibly revealed for what, it is ; as plainly repre- 
sented in their apparent ugliness, these elements become 
modifications of the beautiful. We must look for insuperable 
ugliness in its highest degree in the falsely beautiful produced 
by the confusion of aims and feelings in conscious representa- 
tion, i.e. in art. We shall find it in the sentimental presented 
as touching, the effeminate as tender, in the feeble taken to be 
delicate, the tawdry taken to be brilliant, and the monstrous 
taken to be strong. Its lower degrees we shall find in the 
utilitarian works of man, not always as ugly in themselves, 
except when they present a simulated show of ornament de- 
void of interest or vitality, or as in discords of sound and 
colour introduce an artificial definiteness that has no aesthetic 
relations, but creating by their simple abstract shapes and un- 



1 An objection occurs here. Why, if painting has all that sculpture had, 
and more, do we still care for sculpture after painting has been developed, or 
for painting when music has been developed? I suppose the answer is that 
the " something more " is something more than for all purposes we want and 
so is, in one sense, something less. This " lessness " does not depend on the 
loss of an element, but on the inseparable fusion of two elements, one of which 
we may justifiably desire to have by itself. It may also be noted that sculp- 
ture and painting have never held quite the same position, since painting and 
music respectively reached their highest development, as they had before. 



436 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



graded colours an element of interference with the subtle and 
variously graduated content of external nature. In external 
nature itself it is hard by this standard to pronounce any- 
thing insuperably ugly except perhaps those disfigurements 
of individuality which indicate an alien life asserting itself 
victoriously within a higher form of existence. Speaking 
generally, is it not true that vegetable decay is beautiful or 
tolerable, and animal decay is ugly ? It must be noted that 
in man the spirit may overcome disfigurement, A wounded 
animal is apt to be ugly ; the dying Nelson is heroic. 

I do not think that Hartmann has given weight to this dis- 
tinction between the negative and the false, or the contradic- 
tory and the confused. And therefore, though he has done 
good service by his robust insistence on the characteristic, I 
cannot think that he has wholly mastered the nature of the 
extension which that insistence demands from the sense of 
formal beauty. The whole in great art, I repeat, is frequently 
shocking to the untrained perception ; the parts are what we 
first see to be endowed with formal beauty. 

To conclude this subject, I may add that Hartmann does 
well by laying down clearly that ugliness and evil have abso- 
lutely no connection except as reflexes in different w 7 orlds of 
the same apparent irrationality within an ultimate rationality. 
Beauty, as we have seen, is symbolic, not imitative, and there- 
fore goes behind the form of morality, which is co-ordinate 
with it, to that soul of things which art and morality render, 
each in its own way. 

The division of iii, " We base the division of the arts 1 on that 
the Arts. Q f esthetic semblance (Sc/iezn), so that we draw 
it from the nature of the case. The division of the aesthetic 
1 Schein ' places in the foreground a division into arts of 
perception and arts of fantasy, which is then crossed by a 
secondary division into threes ; accordingly we shall first have 
to separate the free arts [the unfree arts including architec 
ture and the ' lesser ' arts are placed in a wholly separate 
classification] into two divisions as arts of perceptive 'Schein' 
and of imaginative 'Schein' (Phantasie-Schein), and sub- 
sequently to subdivide each of these groups into threes. Thus 
we obtain to begin with as a primary antithesis the contrast 
of arts of perception and poetic art, by which poetry is 



Hartmann, Aesth., ii. 625. 



PARALLELISMS. 



437 



assigned its due ideal rank as an art of higher phase (Potenz); 
but further, we obtain the parallelism of the arts of perception 
with the species of poetry, corresponding to one another as 
formative art to Epic poetry, Music to Lyric poetry, and 
1 Mimik' (acting and the mimic dance) to the Drama. 

" The lover of abstract designations will be glad to find 
in the primary dichotomy of arts of perception and arts of 
fancy, the truth of Schelling's division into a real and an ideal 
series, and the friends of dialectic triads will recognise to their 
satisfaction, in the secondary triple division of the two groups, 
the triad of objective, subjective, and subjective-objective. 
The secondary triple division represents in addition, among 
the arts of perception the contrast of Rest, Change, and 
Motion, or Spatiality, Temporality, and Spatio-temporality, or 
eye-semblance, ear-semblance and the two together ; while in 
the arts of the reproductive imagination (reproduktiven Phan- 
tasieschein) it represents at least the predominance or equili- 
brium of the elements in question. In both groups or series, 
finally, the secondary triple division represents the predomi- 
nance of perception, of feeling, and the equilibrium of the 
two. It is obvious at first sight that the epos, intended for 
recitation, is in its plastic and coloured (plastisch-koloristischen) 
vividness just as analogous to formative art, as the song, which 
is meant to be sung, to music, and the drama, which is meant 
to be played, to ' Mimik' ; and these analogies and parallelisms 
have so often been noted and insisted on in detail, that it is 
absolutely incomprehensible how it has been left for me finally 
to combine them." 

" Finally 1 we have to answer the question how the com- 
pound arts are related in aesthetic value to the simple arts. 
Here there are two extreme views ; one rejects the compound 
arts altogether, because each of their elements is hindered by 
its relation to the others in the freedom and independence 
of its development ; the other view treats of the simple arts 
only as steps on the ladder to the achievement of the total 
work of art, and sees the true realization of the work of 
art according to its idea exclusively in the latter. As usual 
the truth lies between them. The simple arts can no more 
replace the complex ones than the latter can make the former 
superfluous. As surely as 'Mimik' 2 judged by its abstract 



1 P. 824. 2 See above, p. 422, On the principle of conflict. 



438 



HISTORY OF AESTHETIC. 



aesthetic value, stands higher in the system of arts than the 
one-sided arts of rest and change [i.e. formative art and 
music!] which it synthetically transcends and absorbs, but 
yet the practice of the latter is not replaced or made super- 
fluous by this fact [How kind!], as surely as poetry stands 
higher in aesthetic value than the arts of perception which it 
synthetically transcends and absorbs, without thereby annihilat- 
ing the raison d'etre of formative art, music, and ' Mimik,' as 
surely as the quaternary complex arts stand higher in abstract 
aesthetic than the ternary, without thereby requiring that the 
song, the oratorio, the ballet, or the stage play, should wholly 
give place to the opera, just so surely the simple arts are 
bound to maintain their place in general besides the complex 
ones, although the latter occupy in the system a higher posi- 
tion in abstract aesthetic value." 

This, I must observe at once, is really method run mad. 
Assuming that the phrase "transcending and absorbing" has, 
as it may have when reasonably interpreted, a meaning in 
comparing the powers of music with those of painting, or the 
powers of painting with those of sculpture, is it not quite 
clear that no analogy holds from this fusion of powers or 
qualities in the nature of a single medium or type of fancy, 
like sound compared with paint, to the mechanical combination 
of them by the association of different media in separable 
aspects of a compound work ? The whole passage, which I 
quoted because it puts Hartmann's view conveniently to- 
gether, and shows the outrageous results of the extreme 
Wagnerian influence (I do not say of Wagner's own theo- 
retical writings, with which I am not acquainted), could hardly 
have been written by any man with a true feeling for any 
branch of art. 

The principle of division with its results is of the same 
general kind with that of Schasler, and is subject to the same 
criticisms in respect of the double series, the neglect of the 
material and its inspiration, 1 and of the decorative or "lesser" 
arts (to which neglect we may add in Hartmann's case the low 
position assigned to architecture), the insertion of "Mimik" 
at a high point in the scale, and the parallelism between the 
traditional species of poetry and the other forms of art. There 
is, however, an attempt to deal with more modern forms of 

1 Just referred to, p. 552, but not further employed. 



THE COMPLEX ARTS. 



439 



poetic art, as for example the dramatic lyric, 1 the nature of 
which is fairly explained, but is set down with the usual 
formula as a transition to the drama, from which it is really 
quite alien, being essentially an individual characterization, 
and, so far as we yet see, incompatible with the tendency to 
combine characters in a drama that will really work. The cul- 
mination of the whole system in the "quaternary combination " 
has already been criticised. The problem of these combinations 
is closely akin to one of translation, the question being how 
far the same idea can have its aspects adequately and har- 
moniously rendered in different media. Now translation from 
the language of one art into that of another is a hopeless 
thing except in a few happy or very easy cases. Sometimes 
the same content which has moulded itself in one medium 
will by suggestion but without compulsion mould itself corre- 
spondingly in another, and then a great combination will arise. 2 
But the arc for which two great minds will follow the same 
orbit, or for which the same mind, however great, can control 
two disparate media, is necessarily small, and its limit is the 
inevitable limit of great work in complex art. The true 
complex art, indeed, has been banished from the genuine arts 
by the author. In architecture, so organic yet simple is its 
growth, so vast its extension, and so intimate yet unambitious 
its inter-relation with the joys and needs of life, not only 
very many workmen but very many kinds of workmanship 
can be brought together with spontaneity and success. Archi- 
tecture is the true type of a complex art. 

We have seen the inheritance of the great idealists being 
methodically completed in the hands of able and learned men, 
who thought it well, and justly, to borrow the apparatus of 
accurate science and formal definition from the "exact" en- 
quirers who were opposed to the earlier concrete idealism. 
Issues are more plainly stated, the theory of formal beauty 
is exhibited with more method and detail ; on any branch of 
aesthetic production some sensible observations may be found 
by using the elaborate tables of contents of the later systematic 
writers. 

But with methodic completion and the general acceptance 
of fairly enlightened views scholasticism has set in. The 
touch of life is lost ; the passion for novelty passes into 



P. 740 ff. 2 As in Beethoven's use of the Hymn to Gladness. 



440 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



bizarre suggestions, and the desire to make discoveries, in- 
compatible with the philosophic temper, displays itself in idle 
rearrangements and refinements of classification. 

Clearness of methodic arrangement and the habit of telling 
one's story plainly, together with a full recognition of the 
place and import of beauty as apart from edification, from 
amusement or sensuous satisfaction, from imitation, and from 
mere formal decoration, have been won by the idealist 
methodisers with the help of the exact sestheticians, and 
will not again be lost. But from the theory of content and 
expression which has thus been perfected, the content has 
itself in some degree oozed away. It may be mere national 
prejudice, but I believe it to be a well-grounded conviction, 
which causes me to turn to England for a re-animation of the 
bond between content and expression. As the true value 
of German idealism in general philosophy was never under- 
stood, till the genius of English naturalists had revolutionised 
our conception of the organic world, so the spirit of German 
aesthetic will not be appreciated until the work of its founders 
shall have been renewed by the direct appreciative sense of 
English art and criticism. With a very brief account of this 
in the ensuing chapter I propose to conclude the present 
work. 



CHAPTER XV. 



BEGINNINGS OF A THEORETICAL REUNION BETWEEN CONTENT 

AND EXPRESSION. 

Philosophic i. ^Esthetic theory in Germany, we saw reason 
recent English to think, was the operative ferment from which 

Esthetic. German Idealism sprang, and was immediately 
reacted upon by that Idealism. The English mind tra- 
velled by a different road and arrived at a corresponding 
aesthetic position from complementary but different data. 

Between the two movements there was little direct contact. 
From Alison in 1790 to Mill, Spencer, and Bain in the middle 
of the nineteenth century, British psychological philosophy 
maintains its course, attributing aesthetic effect mainly to 
association, and advancing the real problem, viz. w T hat is 
accidental in association and what is not, little beyond the 
point at which Burke had left it. True English aesthetic has 
not sprung from philosophy or philosophers, except through 
the negative contact of Mr. Ruskin with Alison and Burke. 
Only Herbert Spencer, as has been noticed above, 1 made a 
real contribution to the ideas of spontaneity and economy in 
the beautiful, in the latter case certainly anticipating Fechner, 
and independently confirming the results of the brothers 
Weber. 2 On the other hand Spencer's theory of the vocal 
origin of music is not even directed to a serious problem. 
Granting for the sake of argument that musical beauty was 
first apprehended through the voice, we gain from this no sort 
of explanation as to the conditions which underlie the musical 
expressiveness of the voice itself. The fragmentary and 
partial, although prior in time, must be explained by the 
systematic, and not the systematic by the partial. In so far 
as voice-modulation has musical expressiveness, its beauty de- 
pends upon musical relations, which in a vastly wider range 
of effect than that of vocal cadences are the matter to be 
explained. 



1 P, 386 supra, 2 See p, 386 supra* 

441 



44 2 HISTORY OF AESTHETIC. 

— ■ — 

With German philosophy, previously to the development 
of the English aesthetic of which I am about to treat, and 
during its course, there has been I believe but a very slight 
and negative connection. How far the pregnant ideas filtered 
through Coleridge and Carlyle may have influenced Mr. 
Ruskin is a question which I cannot answer. 1 But no such 
influence seems to me to be needed as an explanation of his 
life work. Other conditions, not proceeding either from 
philosophers or from the universities, were more effectually 
brought to bear. 
~ 1T _ 2. The French Revolution, to which, as Car- 

General Innu- ' ' 1 

enceofthe lyle suggested, the intellectual work of Goethe s 
generation bore a strange analogy, marked rather 
than created an immense disquieting force in many directions. 
Our islands, thrown back on their insularity by the Peninsular 
War, nevertheless felt the electricity of the general atmo- 
sphere. I will enumerate rather than attempt to analyse the 
conditions which constituted the "data" of our "modern 
aesthetic." 

m _ a. Winckelmann had grumbled, we remember, 

Antiquities. . . . . . . . & , , . 

that valuable antiquities were constantly being 
carried off and shut up in English country houses, and Eng- 
land like other countries was eager for the spoil, under the in- 
fluence of a revived Renaissance connoisseurship. Before 1815 
no Greek works of the fifth century B.C. were in the British 
Museum. In that year, after a discussion that is now amusing 
to read, 2 showing once more how taste worked back from the 
lesser and later to the greater and earlier antiquities, the 



1 I should have thought that Mr. Collingwood exaggerated the probability 
of connection ; see Ruskin's Art Teaching, p. 16. 

2 I extract an account of this matter from a lecture by Miss Sellers, printed 
in the U. E. Journal, March, 1892. 

" The Government, to whom Lord Elgin had repeatedly offered the Marbles 
for sale, had been as often dissuaded from the purchase by the judgment of 
artists, and in particular of the ' connoisseur,' Mr. Payne Knight, whose 
prejudiced action in this matter may, however, be forgiven, when we re- 
member the beautiful bronzes and other objects which he afterwards be- 
queathed to the Museum. In 181 5 the Government was roused by the 
admiration which the Italian sculptor, Canova, had evinced for the Marbles, 
to appoint a Committee to reconsider the matter of the purchase. The 
account of the last battle is worth reading from Haydon's own biography : — 

" 'The Committee opened its proceedings. West, President of the Royal 
Academy, Lawrence, Nollekens, Flaxman, and Westmacott were summoned 



THE ELGIN MARBLES 



--5 



Elorin marbles and about the same time the Phicraleian frieze 
were acquired for the Museum. Since that date the lacunae 
in the periods represented have been filled up by works of the 
sixth, fourth, and third centuries B.C., and the eyes of students 
have been familiarized with the real value and sequence of 
phases of beauty- which Winckelmann had so marvellously 
divined. 



Lord Aberdeen, Sir Charles Lone. Lord Famboroueh, and seven others. Lord 



ably impressed with the tom- 
; cloven foot The favourable 
ite side was paid the greatest 
aesses, Nollekens called them 
ings." Flaxman said they were 
seen, though he preferred the 



e to the Theseus 17 (the gods forgive him !). Chantry said 
tling to Nature in the grand style." West feebly praised them, 
x>ke out for them manfully. He said he considered them 
2 highest style of art. of essential importance to art. and par- 
ical rjamting/' Mr/Payne Knight was equally decided. He 
Dwne's \ enus or Mercury was " each worth any two " of the 
d Elgin's collection, that the Theseus was ££ spurious/' and the 



:s, M.P., one of their number, to in- 
I not be examined out of delicacv to 



Mr 



Jy by his personal defeat, but by the 
iie nation after all wrote that cele- 
nt of Connoisseurs bring preferred to 
mercilessly showing up the falsity of 
dx. Payne Knight), he passes to his 
jse divine things," he concluded, with 
style of the time cannot dim — 'to 



to do so to the end of my life. Such a blast will Fame blow of their grandeur, 
that its roaring will swell out as time advances, and nations now sunk in bar- 
barism, and ages yet unborn, will in succession be roused by its thunder, and 
be refined by its harmony. Pilgrims from the remotest corners of the earth 
will visit their shrine and be pacified bv their beauty.' 

" The outburst silenced the opponents, the Marbles were purchased for the 
Museum, but Haydon, poor man, paid dearly for his victory, by bringing down 
upon himself the undying hatred and persecution of the men whose ignorance 



444 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



science ^' ^ ^ s a striking fact 1 that the first volume of 
Modern Painters was published in the same year 
as Stuart Mill's Logic (1843). It is needless to recite the 
history, familiar, I hope, in its outlines "to every schoolboy," 
of the achievements of the scientific spirit during the present 
century. Its result, for our purpose, may be stated in general 
language as the recognition of rational system throughout the 
universe accessible to man. More particularly, on the side 
facing aesthetic theory, we may signalize two tendencies with- 
in this movement. First, it brought nature nearer to man, 
and showed him his own intelligence both mirrored in its 
causation and rooted in its evolution ; and secondly, it re- 
vealed in all phenomena, inorganic, organic, and belonging to 
humanity, the definite distinctive characteristics which on the 
one hand had stamped them for what they individually were, 
and on the other displayed them in their microcosmic relations 
as meeting-points of the complex influences that permeate 
the universe. In this latter connection the life work of Sir 
Charles Bell, 2 directed against the abstract ideal in art and 
towards a causal theory of expressiveness in the human face 
and figure, paved the way for Darwin's researches upon that 
subject. The whole result of geology, and of the organic 
sciences guided by the principle of natural selection, 3 has been 
to the same effect, and even the phenomena of colour in plants 
and animals have been shown to play their part in the causal 
system. 4 In this last relation the conception forces itself on 
the mind that the import of colour distinctions might perhaps 
be approached not only by assuming the connection of wave- 
length and hue, and asking how on this hypothesis organisms 

1 Collingwood, op. cit. 20 and 76. 

2 E.g. Lectures on the Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression, 1st ed. 1806, 
re-written 1840 (Geo. Bell & Son, 1880). It is remarkable that in this work 
he gives the same explanation of Laocoon's alleged silence as that of Goethe 
(did Goethe get it from him ?) viz that from his physical attitude Laocoon 
could not cry out. Payne Knight's ideas, which he is combating, show entire 
ignorance of Lessing. Knight actually says that no tragedian could let a hero 
cry out at his death-wound without making the audience laugh. I must own 
that the representation of Agamemnon's death-cry, which Knight seems not 
to know of, did once in my recollection cause a smile. 

8 Of course this principle was not made known till long after Mr. Ruskin's 
work had begun. The Naturalist 's Voyage must have appeared about the 
same year with the Modern Painters and Mill's Logic. Its second edition 
bears date 1845. 

4 See Grant Allen on the Colour- Sense. 



THE NEW BIRTH IN ENGLAND. 



445 



are benefited by the possession of this or that reflecting 
surface, but also by examining this connection itself, as a 
relation that must have been causally determined in the 
course of evolution. It is conceivable that some advantage 
was to be found in the wave-length 1 commonest on the earth's 
surface being seen as green rather than as red. Only the 
ethereal undulation was given ; the corresponding sensation, 
for all we know, was modifiable. 

Romantic Natur- c. As a complementary counterpart to the 
aiism. scientific revelation of the world as responsive to 
reason, there developed with amazing rapidity the conviction 
— sentimental in Schiller's sense — that the world had also 
a response for feeling. The mere history of the tour and 
the guide-book, from Rousseau, Goethe, and De Saussure, 
through Wordsworth 2 to Ruskin, and thence to the modern 
sentimental tourist of the worse or better type, would well 
repay the writing. With the tourist come the field geologist 
and the field botanist, and with these come the landscape 
painter. It w T as rather through Wordsworth, Turner, Lyell, 
and Darwin, than through a Winckelmann, a Lessing, or a 
Schiller, that the new renaissance dawned in England. The 
insularity of our country had to do with this detachment. No 
one can read Goethe's story of his childhood without seeing 
how his imagination was affected by the pageants of the 
Empire at Frankfort — the visible organic continuity into which 
he was born. The sense of history and the spirit that is 
sympathetically critical of the religions and philosophies of 
past times were wanting to the leaders of our thought. Those 
who w T ere sympathetic were not critical ; those who w T ere 
critical were not sympathetic. Yet from the time of Walter 
Scott our sentimentalism became capable of a historical 
colouring ; a new feeling for Gothic architecture and the 
"lesser arts" arose; attempts, however ill-directed in some 
respects, were made to familiarize our people with the art 
and workmanship of other times and countries ; and when the 
" pre-Raphaelite brotherhood " had begun its enterprise and 
the voice of Carlyle had made itself heard, the same spirit of 
thoroughness, audacity, and penetrative insight that was con- 



1 See Grant Allen, op. cit. on the prevalence of green on the earth's surface 
in early times of evolution. 

2 Author, it must be remembered, of a Guide to the English Lakes I 



446 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



quering the intellectual world under the banner of science, 
began to reorganize the world of feeling under that of roman- 
tic naturalism in art. For I must repeat that normally and 
on the large scale romance and naturalism are the same. The 
modern yearning for external nature has the same root as the 
modern love of symbolism, of character, and of passion. It 
is only a would-be scientific naturalism, 1 at once prurient and 
moralistic, that is opposed to romance, and a conventional 
romantic sentiment, remote from the feeling for genuine pas- 
sion, that is opposed to naturalism. 

The Democratic d It ought not to be supposed that I am 
i spirit. wandering from my subject if I point out in the 
briefest words that behind and within all these phenomena 
there was operative the rising spirit of democratic solidarity. 
In England we did not derive this spirit by way of philo- 
sophical inspiration from the Hellenes ; it sprang up from 
complex causes, including the destructive aspect of science, 
but also more deeply rooted in the European and national 
circumstances of the time, and it carried our interest to 
Hellas, 2 not Hellas to it. The " watchword of Reason and 
Freedom " 3 and the ideal of a human and beautiful life for 
every man were not popularized here, as in Germany, through 
professorial and scholarly persons in association with classical 
culture, and historical continuity, and the dominant philoso- 
phy of the universities. On the contrary, they were wrought 
out in various detail by political and social reformers, by 
abstract sceptical philosophers, by poets and men of letters, 
by artists and by special students of art and history. There- 
fore the connection of social life with beauty was long un- 

1 It is not my business to attempt the work of the art-critic. The philo- 
sopher's task begins when he has the best critical opinion before him. But I 
may appeal to my readers to judge whether it is not true that the three anti- 
aesthetic tendencies of art, the " scientific," the moralistic, and the impure, 
are constantly found in union. Of course, an artist may have great genius 
and yet be hampered in his art by a theory which has these results. 

2 I mean to genuine Hellenic thought and politics and beauty. The phil- 
Hellene enthusiasm of Byron, Shelley, and Keats forms no doubt an 
important link through European politics with the spirit of the time, but had, 
I believe, little effect in the way of spreading a real feeling for Hellenic 
antiquity. The fact that Keats knew the Greeks only through the classical 
dictionary is most instructive with regard to the connection between art- 
stimulus and learning. Grote's History is plainly a result of political sym- 
pathy. He believed that Athens progressed by Reform Bills. 

3 Hegel, Briefe. 



ENGLISH .ESTHETIC. 



447 



apparent. The reformers thought first of the industrial 
system and of the franchise, the poets and philosophers of 
sentiment and of knowledge, while the artists lived exclu- 
sively for their art. The spirit of humanity was in all of 
them alike, but was not aware of its own identity ; and thus 
the connection of life and art, of content and expression, was 
reached, so to speak, underground by a de facto induction, 
and was perhaps more vitally grasped, though far less clearly 
and systematically expounded, than where as in Germany it 
had to be attained by the concurrent intellectual labours of 
many men endowed with philosophical genius and reviewing 
an immense field of ordered material, 
synthesis of 3- , Tne strength and weakness of the best 
content and English aesthetic of the last half-century — the 
Expression. wor k principally 0 f Mr. Ruskin and Mr. William 
Morris — lies in its restriction to the field of formative art. 
Never before, so far as I can form a judgment, has such 
critical and literary genius been combined with such definite 
skill in the object-matter of research ; but on the other hand 
— I make this quite obvious reservation once for all, and I 
need not recur to it — no one whose interest is directed to art 
as a wdiole could be satisfied with a theoretical treatment 
which seems not merely to ignore the arts of music and poetry, 
but even at times to imply their non-existence. In this 
criticism I am alluding to the reiterated doctrine of the unity 
of art understood as equivalent to the assertion that if one 
art dies then all are dead. I do not doubt that this idea 
points to a profound truth, or that a diseased social condi- 
tion reacts upon the sense of beauty in all its manifesta- 
tions. But here, as everywhere, we must distinguish the 
partial from the perverse. It is simple matter of history 
that all the various arts have never flourished in their perfec- 
tion — nay not even in a fair degree of forwardness — in the 
same period and in the same country. We know well that 
the several arts touch their culminations not simultaneously 
but in succession, and while I fully admit that the prosperity 
of art in general falls within the great Art-age that closed 
with the Renaissance, yet we must not shut our eyes to the 
fact that music finds its only complete and independent 
development (and of landscape painting almost as much may 
be said) full two centuries after the unity of the art-tradition, 
as our critics understand it, had perished. But in spite of all 



44-8 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



this, at least within the theory of formative art a new vitality 
of connection is supplied by the work of our great writers, 
which precisely justifies, by an undesigned coincidence, the 
conception of the early concrete Idealists of Germany, and sup- 
plements what is defective in the arid formalism of their suc- 
cessors. 

The i- Mr. Ruskin's theoretical treatment of ugli- 

Characteristic. ness 1 ^ces nQt seem to b e } D0 \d enough for truth. 

Technically speaking, he seems to hold the position of Rosen- 
kranz, that ugliness can never become beautiful, but yet is 
essential to art for the sake of completeness. To live wholly 
in beauty, he is said to teach, 2 is unhealthy — a monstrous 
position, if beauty is comprehensively understood. 

But this is not a matter of first-rate importance. As we 
have insisted throughout, the true question is in the first 
instance as to the range and vigour of beauty itself. Now in 
one aspect of this question we owe something like a revolution 
to the English art and criticism of this century. This aspect 
is our appreciation of external nature in the form of landscape 
scenery. Schasler, we may remember, thought landscape so 
wholly a matter of subjective mood that he made it in his 
classification the corresponding term to lyric poetry. Now in 
an ultimate sense it must be true that when we feel the beauty 
of Nature we read our moods into her phenomena. But we 
may do this profoundly or superficially, conceitedly or humbly, 
ignorantly or with insight. If we have eyes for what Hegel 
calls the ''uniform, direct, and solidly coherent sequences of 
nature," we enter into it as though for its own sake, and only 
by so doing can we recognise in it our deeper selves. It is 
this point of view that we owe to Mr. Ruskin's unwearied 
justification of the art of Turner, and it is not too much to say 
that he like Winckelmann has given the mind a new organ 
for the appreciation of beauty. "The characteristic" in nature 
as a whole, though a point of view imperatively demanded by 
the theory of Goethe, Hegel, and Schelling, was a region in 
which we found them weak. 3 They thought more of the in- 
dividual formation, the crystal, the plant, the animal, while 



1 See Collingwood, Ruskin's Art Teaching. 

2 Ib ' 

3 Goethe's morphology had more to do with the specific than with the in- 
dividual characteristic. 



CHARACTER IN NATURE. 



449 



the co-operating laws and larger combinations of phenomena 
were scarcely within the range of the characteristic as they 
understood it. But fully in the spirit of science — though 
guarding himself, as I think, far too timidly from urging scien- 
tific study upon the artist — Mr. Ruskin has pointed out with 
loving appreciation the value and import of variable curves, 
graduated colours, and the nature and stratification of earth 
and rock, so that to the nature-lover versed in this expressive- 
ness, the hills and plains, the cliffs and river-courses are able 
to tell their story like a human face. Without intellectual 
analysis, through the mere habit of sympathy, they are con- 
strued as determined by movements continuously varying, and 
showing themselves in growth, decay, and resistance, that is 
in lawfulness and individuality. It seems needless to dwell at 
length on ideas so familiar to all students of natural beauty, 
but to discharge my duty as a historian, who must not leave 
his readers to do his work wholly for him, I will extract two 
passages that illustrate the beauty of characteristic expression 
in matters in which if we can find it we may find it anywhere. 

" A steep 1 bank of loose earth of any kind that has been 
at all exposed to the weather contains in it, though it may not 
be three feet high, features capable of giving high gratifi- 
cation to a careful observer. It is almost a fac-simile of a 
mountain slope of soft and decomposing rock ; it possesses 
nearly as much variety of character, and is governed by laws 
of organization no less rigid. It is furrowed in the first place 
by undulating lines, caused by the descent of the rain ; little 
ravines, which are cut precisely at the same slope as those of 
the mountain, and leave ridges scarcely less graceful in their 
contour, and beautifully sharp in their chiselling. When a 
harder knot of ground or a stone occurs, the earth is washed 
from beneath it, and accumulated above it, and there we have 
a little precipice connected by a sweeping curve at its summit 
with the great slope, and casting a sharp dark shadow ; where 
the soil has been soft, it will probably be washed away under- 
neath until it gives way, and leaves a jagged hanging irregu- 
lar line of fracture ; and all these circumstances are explained 
to the eye in sunshine with the most delicious clearness; every 
touch of shadow being expressive of some particular truth of 
structure, and bearing witness to the symmetry into which the 



Modern Painters^ i. 307. 



G G 



450 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



whole mass has been reduced. Where this operation has 
gone on long, and vegetation has assisted in softening the out- 
lines, we have our ground brought into graceful and irregular 
curves, of infinite variety, but yet always so connected with 
each other, and guiding to each other, that the eye never feels 
them as separate things, nor feels inclined to count them, nor 
perceives a likeness in one to the other ; they are not repeti- 
tions of each other but are different parts of the same system. 
Each would be imperfect without the one next to it." 44 The 
truths of form in common ground are quite as valuable (let 
me anticipate myself for a moment) quite as beautiful, as any 
others which nature presents." 44 A really great artist dwells 
on every inch of exposed soil with care and delight, and 
renders it one of the most essential, speaking, and pleasur- 
able parts of his composition." 

Or take an example in which the central character of a 
whole complex of natural scenery is summed up in a single 
architectural product, which therefore, if brought before the 
eye in art, prescribes the law for the whole region that is per- 
ceived. 

44 All rivers, 1 small or large, agree in one character, they 
like to lean a little on one side ; they cannot bear to have 
their channels deepest in the middle but will always, if they 
can, have one bank to sun themselves upon, and another to 
get cool under ; one shingly shore to play over, where they 
may be shallow and foolish and childlike, 2 and another steep 
shore under which they can pause and purify themselves, and 
get their strength of waves fully together for due occasion. . . . 
Two arches over the same span of river, supposing the but- 
ments are at the same depth, are cheaper than one, and that 
by a great deal ; so that, where the current is shallow, the 
village mason makes his arches many and low : as the water 
gets deeper and it becomes troublesome to build his piers 
up from the bottom, he throws his arches wider ; at last he 
comes to the deep stream, and as he cannot build at the bot- 
tom of that, he throws the largest arch over it with a leap, 



1 Elements of Drawing, p. 263 ff. 

2 I cannot but regret the playful expressions of this passage, for my present 
purpose, as liable to misunderstanding, though no one who has read Mr. 
Ruskin on the Pathetic Fallacy will misunderstand them. The fact about 
river-courses is familiar to all. 



THE IDEAL BRIDGE. 



45 1 



and with another little one or so gains the opposite shore. 
Of course as arches are wider they must be higher, or they 
will not stand ; so the roadway must rise as the arches widen. 
And thus we have the general type of bridge, with its highest 
and widest arch towards one side, and a train of minor arches 
running over the flat shore on the other ; usually a steep bank 
at the river-side next the large arch ; always of course a flat 
shore on the side of the small ones ; and the bend of the river 
assuredly concave towards this flat, cutting round, with a 
sweep into the steep bank ; or, if there is no steep bank, still 
assuredly cutting into the shore at the steep end of the 
bridge. 

" Now this kind of bridge, sympathizing, as it does, with the 
spirit of the river, and marking the nature of the thing it has 
to deal with, is the ideal of a bridge." 

The characteristic, thus apprehended, including in its ex- 
pression signs of the feeling with which the sympathetic or 
idealised self enters into the world-life thus symbolised, is 
fully in the sense of Hegel, but possesses a wealth and vigour 
which in the beauty of landscape scenery his eye w T as never 
trained to appreciate. And here, in its simplest form, if we 
bear in mind the nature of the curves and graduated surfaces 
demanded according to the above exposition, is the vital bond 
between content and expression. 
The Life of the n - ^ n speaking of Goethe's German Btrilcling 1 

workman. \ alluded to the chapter " On the nature of Gothic " 
in The Stones of Venice. In this chapter and in those 
essays on the same theme, enriched with the knowledge and 
feeling of the practical designer, which- we owe to Mr. Wm. 
Morris, the unity of content and expression is stated on a 
higher level, or as Schelling would have said, in a higher 
4< power." Here the root of identity is not a causal process of 
nature assigned a meaning by analogy, but it is the life of a 
self-conscious being. The reason why this identity had to be 
specially and forcibly dragged to light in the case of the work- 
man in architecture is that in this art only (including in it " the 
lesser arts of life") could it ever be attempted to divorce 
them. No one would maintain as a general doctrine that a 
dramatist might confine himself to constructing his scenario, 
and leave his secretary to write the dialogue, or that a painter 



1 P. 306 supra. 



452 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



might be satisfied 1 with furnishing the cartoons for a picture, 
and leave it to a journeyman to execute. But just because in 
these higher arts the inseparability of content and expression 
is pre-supposed, owing to the high degree of individual talent 
demanded even for tolerable performance, the connection of 
the two aspects within these arts is assumed rather than 
scrutinised, and is apt to drop out of its true place in the 
theory. Architecture at once challenges an answer. It is 
determined by utility of some kind ; it is not primarily a 
representative art ; the work set to the individual workman 
appears simple, partial, and definite. Why need he be thought 
of as an artist, or the determination of his mind freely by a 
content instead of mechanically by a gauge be insisted on at 
all ? We have here a limiting case. I answer in Mr. Ruskin's 
words. 2 

"It is, perhaps, the principal admirableness of Gothic 
schools of architecture, that they thus receive the results of 
the labour of inferior minds ; and out of fragments full of im- 
perfection, and betraying that imperfection in every touch, in- 
dulgently raise up an unaccusable whole." " For the best that is 
in them (the workmen) cannot manifest itself unless in company 
with much error. Understand this clearly. You can teach a man 
to draw a straight line, and to cut one, or to strike a curved line 
and to carve it, and to copy or carve any number of given lines 
or forms, with admirable speed and perfect precision, 3 and you 
find his work perfect of its kind ; but if you ask him to think 
about any of those forms, to consider if he cannot find any better 
in his own head, he stops; his execution becomes hesitating ; he 
thinks, and ten to one he thinks wrong ; ten to one he makes 
a mistake in the first touch he gives to his work as a thinking 
being. But you have made a man of him for all that. He 
was only a machine before, an animated tool." "On the other 
hand, if you will make a man of him, you cannot make a tool. 



1 Approximations to such practices on the part of fresco painters and of 
sculptors who work only in clay raise the same problems as architecture. 

2 Stones of Venice, ii. 161-2. 

3 In so far as true Greek work is classed with the " servile " work, there 
seems to be here a certain neglect of the extreme difference between Greek and 
Roman ornaments. Greek moulding-curves, we are told, cannot be struck 
with compasses, and if they are copied such copying as this surely requires 
some free qualities in the workman. I regret that my technical ignorance dis- 
qualifies me from entering further into this subject. See p. 35 supra. 



ETHIC AND /ESTHETIC. 



453 



Let him but begin to imagine, to think, to try to do anything 
worth doing, and the engine-turned precision is lost at once. 
Out come all his roughness, all his dulness, all his incapability ; 
but out comes the whole majesty of him also ; and we know 
the height of it only when we see the clouds settling upon 
him." "And on the other hand go forth again to gaze upon 
the old cathedral front where you have smiled so often at the 
fantastic ignorance of the old sculptors ; examine once more 
those ugly goblins and formless monsters, and stern statues, 
anatomiless and rigid, but do not mock at them, for they are 
the signs of the life and liberty of every workman who struck 
the stone ; a freedom of thought and rank in the scale of being, 
such as no laws, no charters, no charities can secure ; but which 
it must be the first aim of all Europe at this day to regain for 
her children." 

It is probable that some readers may not recognise that we 
have here in essence the same problem with that which, follow- 
ing Kant, nearly all German writers discuss under the title of 
" Genius" ; that is to say, the peculiar endowment by which 
the rational content is given in a state of active and productive 
feeling, and by which all production of beauty is distinguished 
toto ccelo from everything in the nature of scientific apprehen- 
sion. " In artistic production, the spiritual and sensuous side 
must be as one." 1 The bond of union is this, in short, that as 
in a natural process the form expresses the law, so in the work 
of a man, as long as no machine intervenes, his operative 
ideas qua operative, together with their results in the way 
of automatic activity, are expressed in the production of his 
hands. The work reveals the man, and the man is the incar- 
nation (in sense and feeling) of ideas. This is in conscious 
production the link between content and expression. I do 
not substantially assent to the criticism passed by popular 
writers upon Mr. Ruskin, that he turns aesthetic into ethic. 
We are dealing, of course, with a thinker who cares no jot for 
system or formula ; but if we try to interpret, we must inter- 
pret fairly by the whole drift of his doctrine. I may here 
refer 2 to what I said in dealing with Plato as to the essential 



1 Hegel's sEsth.^ Introd., E. Tr. p. 74. Hegel says in another place of the 
gem-cutter that he must have his ideas in the form of [muscular and tactile] 
feeling, for he cannot so much as see his minuter work. Plainly this, in some 
sense, is true of all art. 

2 On the moralistic principle in Plato, p. 18 supra. 



454 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



connection between the content of ethic and that of aesthetic, 
which it is a worse error to neglect, than to state with technical 
incorrectness. I do not think that in the main Mr. Ruskin is 
chargeable with anything but a technical defect in philosophic 
formulation. I will admit, however, that there are occasional 
sermons which I cannot altogether defend, and which are 
chiefly to be regretted because they give a passing interest to 
malicious platitudes which no one would otherwise attend to. 1 
It is necessary to observe that in this feeling for content we 
recognise the social spirit and the spirit of true history, which 
has in all provinces of research gained ground during the pre- 
sent century. In Germany, we observed, the historical led up 
to the aesthetic synthesis; 2 in England aesthetic insight has 
had a remarkable influence both on historical research and on 
economic theory. 

content and Ex- m * Less ambitious than the immense literary 
pression in the activity of Mr. Ruskin, but of the very highest 

" Lesser Arts " • • • 

critical quality, are the contributions of Mr. 
Wm. Morris to the theory of expression on the basis of the 
lesser arts. The neglect of these arts has been through- 
out the weak point of the intellectual aesthetic of Germany 
(Plato knew better) ; but it was only in the later methodisers 
of idealism that, as we saw, the feeling for material fell wholly 
away, and was replaced in the classification of the arts by all 
sorts of mere abstract corollaries from the nature of their 
media. I do not believe that the question of the classification 
of the "higher " arts can be properly approached except from 
the point of view supplied by the simple experience of the 
distinctions which arise automatically and react on the fancy 
and the design in the use of such materials as clay, glass, 
wood, metal, and stone. I quote enough to show in what 
way this vital feeling of the material operates upon the con- 
nection of content and expression, and upon the general defi- 
nition of beauty. 



1 No one would turn his head to listen to the remark that " All art is use- 
less," which is as old as Aristotle in matter, and claims attention merely by a 
certain malice of expression, if Mr. Ruskin had not challenged it by main- 
taining in a vein of paradox easily intelligible, that all art is useful. 

2 Although the latter again affected the former ; Ranke seems to have been 
first interested in his subject by Walter Scott's novels, though adversely to 
their representations. It was the historic interest in the form it took for the 
romantic school that preceded philosophical aesthetic. 



THE ROOT OF BEAUTY. 



455 



"No doubt 1 many of you have wandered through the galleries 
of the admirable museum of South Kensington, and like me, 
have been filled with wonder and gratitude at the beauty 
which has been born from the brain of man. Now consider, 
I pray you, what these wonderful works are, and how they 
were made ; and indeed it is neither in extravagance nor with- 
out due meaning that I use the word wonderful in speaking 
of them. Well, these things are just the common household 
goods of those past days, and that is one reason why they are 
so few and so carefully treasured. They were common things 
in their own day, used without fear of breaking or spoiling — 
no rarities then — and yet we have called them ' wonderful.' 

"And how were they made ? Did a great artist draw the 
designs for them— a man of cultivation, highly paid, daintily 
fed, carefully housed, wrapped up in cotton wool, in short, 
when he was not at work ? By no means. Wonderful as 
these works are, they were made by ' common fellows,' as 
the phrase goes, in the common course of their daily labour. 
Such were the men we honour in honouring those works. 
And their labour — do you think it was irksome to them ? 
Those of you who are artists know very well that it was not ; 
that it could not be. Many a grin of pleasure, I will be 
bound — and you will not contradict me — went to the carrying 
through of those mazes of mysterious beauty, to the invention 
of those strange beasts and birds and flowers that we ourselves 
have chuckled over at South Kensington. While they were 
at work, at least, these men were not unhappy, and I suppose 
they worked most days, and most part of the day, as we do." 
" That 2 thing which I understand by real art is expression 
by man of his pleasure in labour." 

" Now 3 as to the kindred art of making glass vessels. It 
is on much the same footing as the potter's craft. Never till 
our own day has an ugly or stupid glass vessel been made ; 4 
and no wonder, considering the capabilities of the art. In 
the hands of a good workman the metal is positively alive, 



1 Morris's Lectures on Art, p. 55. 

2 IK P- 58. 

3 Lectures on Art, by Morris and others, p. 195. 

4 There is much that sounds like this in Hartmann's Aesth., ii. 136 ff., 
but it will be observed that his reprobation of fraudulent ornament starts 
from the postulate of simple utility, and does not allude in any degree to the 
connection of shape etc. with the pleasure of the craftsman. 



45^ 



HISTORY OF AESTHETIC. 



and is, you may say, coaxing him to make something pretty. 
Nothing but commercial enterprise capturing an unlucky man 
and setting him down in the glassmaker's chair with his 
pattern beside him (which I should think must generally have 
been designed by a landscape gardener) — nothing but this 
kind of thing will turn out ugly glasses. This stupidity will 
never be set right till we give up demanding accurately gauged 
glasses made by the gross. I am fully in earnest when I say 
that if I were setting about getting good glasses made, I would 
get some good workmen together, tell them the height and 
capacity of the vessels I wanted, and perhaps some general 
idea as to the kind of shape, and then let them do their best. 
Then I would sort them out as they came from the annealing 
arches, (what a pleasure that would be !) and I would put a 
good price on the best, for they would be worth it, and I do 
not believe that the worst would be bad." 

" For 1 all that, it is true that these non-architectural races 
(let the Chinese stand as a type of them) have no general 
mastery over the arts, and seem to play with them rather than 
to try to put their souls into them. Clumsy-handed as the 
European or Aryan workman is (of a good period, I mean) 
compared with his Turanian fellow, there is a seriousness and 
meaning about his work that raises it as a piece of art far 
above the deftness of China and Japan ; and it is this very 
seriousness, and a depth of feeling which brought to bear upon 
the matters of daily life is in fact the soul of Architecture, what- 
ever the body may be ; so that I shall still say that among our- 
selves the men of modern Europe, the existence of the other 
arts is bound up with that of Architecture. . . . For this 
art of building is the true democratic art, the child of the man- 
inhabited earth, the expression of the life of man thereon." 

The views thus eloquently but quite definitely expressed 
are not a matter below the consideration of philosophy, al- 
though they would need development and explanation in 
order to hold true of the individual and highly imaginative 
forms of art. They supply an essential factor in aesthetic 
theory which neither the bare doctrine of characteristic ex- 
pression nor even the closer analysis attempted by formalist 
aesthetic have the power to furnish. As I said above, the 
true correlative to these conceptions is Kant's doctrine of 



Lectures, by Morris and others, p. 184. 



EXPANSION OF THE SELF. 



457 



genius, 1 and, I may add, Schiller's doctrine of play, and Hegel's 
of the ideal. The theoretical question is this : Granted that 
art and beauty have a content, the revelation of which to 
sense is their distinctive mark, yet how, by what mechanism, 
so to speak, is the content got into the form of utterance in 
a definite object appealing to sense ? The answer is given 
on a small scale, but justly and profoundly, by the lesser arts 
of life. The content gets into the product through being in 
the man, and through being in the man in such a way that in 
as far as he is free in his producing activity, the content will, 
by means of disciplined habit together with overmastering 
impulse, modify his production with satisfaction to himself. 
Psychologists tell us that pleasure appears to indicate both 
harmony and expansion of the self. The content which 
appears in art seems then to operate through that expansion 
of the self which comes in utterance, and which from the 
nature of the content claims to be a harmonious expansion. 
I suppose, in fact, that every expansion qua expansion must 
be harmonious. Contradiction baffles and exhausts attention, 
and so counteracts expansion. 

Thus the simple genuine experience which this artist-writer 
puts before us, corroborates and completes the theories both 
of the great idealists and of the ''exact" aestheticians. The 
man, as he is when his nature is at one with itself, or, as 
Schiller says, when he is at play, is the needed middle term 
between content and expression ; and the characteristic utter- 
ance that genuinely issues from the fulness of a man's heart 
may be savage, clumsy, or grotesque, but will not be ugly. 2 
How different all this is from " the piece of slang 3 that does 
not mean the harmless thing it seems to mean — art for 
art's sake," and from the false accuracy 4 of the doctrine that 
banishes architecture out of the province of the free arts, 
while allowing that it is beautiful. 



1 Cf. Morris and others, p. 217. "Some beautiful piece of nature must 
[if we are to make good wall-paper designs] have impressed itself on our notice 
so forcibly that we are quite full of it, and can, by submitting ourselves to 
the rules of art [the formal principles of expressiveness] express our pleasure 
to others." 

2 Cf. Goethe's Deutsche Baukunst, p. 309-10, supra. 

3 Morris's Lectures on A?'t, p. 54. 

4 See Hartmann on Architecture, and on the merits of the question, cf. 
Prof. Brown, Fine Arts. 



45* 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



iv. The synthesis of content and expression in 

Penetrative - y . . „ , . , L . . 

imagination and that characteristic which overmasters the mind 
th Beauty S ° f an d feeling receives a splendid development in 
Mr. Ruskin's analysis of " The penetrative Ima- 
gination." 1 I am sorry to learn 2 that in later years Mr. Ruskin 
abandoned the fruitful distinction here drawn between Imagina- 
tion and Fancy. The name of Imagination, he applied, when 
this chapter was written, to the insight which seizes the heart 
of a matter, and works from within outwards, while Fancy he 
identified with the spirit that luxuriates in detail without ever 
piercing to the core. And the. deepest truth is touched when 
he reminds us that thus understood Imagination is charged 
with love and fire, while Fancy is indifferent and frigid, " one 
of the hardest-hearted of the intellectual faculties." I ob- 
served, in reproducing Goethe's scheme of aesthetic qualities, 
upon the subordinate position which it assigns to the " Phan- 
tomisten," 3 or votaries of capricious fancy. The fact is, that 
from Aristotle's account of tragedy as representation of life 
and action to Shakespeare's " holding the mirror up to 
nature," 4 we do not find capricious or unreal fancy in the 
work or theories of the greatest men. But I do not know 
that the consequences of this truth had been drawn out with 
the requisite audacity before the Modern Painters was written. 
I need not point out how such a view of imagination must 
crown the growing recognition of the characteristic in beauty. 

"It may seem 5 to the reader that I am incorrect in calling 
this penetrating possession-taking faculty Imagination. Be it 
so ; the name is of little consequence ; the faculty itself, called 
by what name we will, I insist upon as the highest intellectual 
power of man." " Every great conception of poet or painter 
is held and treated by this faculty. Every character that is 
so much as touched by men like /Eschylus, Homer, Dante, 
or Shakespeare, is by them held by the heart ; and every 
circumstance or sentence of their being speaking or seeming is 



1 Modern Painters, vol. ii. sect. II. c. 3 

2 Collingwood, Ruskin's Art-teaching, p. 138. 

3 P. 314, supra. 

4 On the other hand, Shakespeare's account of imagination as a faculty of 
the unreal is put in the mouth of Theseus, the half-contemptuous, though wise 
and liberal sovereign. The account of it as deceptive is given to Touch- 
stone. 

5 Modern Painters, vol. ii., chap. " of Imagination Penetrative." 



BEAUTY IN TWO SENSES. 



459 



seized by process from within and is referred to that inner 
secret spring of which the hold is never lost for an instant ; 
so that every sentence, as it has been thought out from the 
heart, opens for us a way down to the heart, leads us to the 
centre, and then leaves us to gather what more we may." 

How far the synthesis of beauty and essential expressive- 
ness which we should expect to accompany such an idea of 
the imagination has really been attained by Mr. Ruskin is a 
point on which it would be rash to pronounce. Between the 
first and the second volume of the Modern Painters there was 
an interval of at least three years, and in forming a final 
opinion it would not be just to confine ourselves to these two 
volumes, nor even to the Modem Painters as a whole. 

At first sight, and judging by those two first and more 
purely theoretical volumes, a natural and laudable inconsistency 
would seem to have overtaken him, the inconsistency which 
we have so often noted as arising from the self-assertion of 
the wider, as against the narrower and more familiar meaning 
of the term " beauty." The first volume, in laying out the 
gigantic scheme of the work, enumerates as distinct subjects 
of treatment within the excellence of Art, ideas of Power, 
Imitation, Truth, Beauty, and Relation. Here Beauty ranks, 
as in name it did for Goethe, and as in fact it did for Rosen- 
kranz, as one among other excellences of art as art. In the 
further course of the same volume ideas of Power (i.e. exe- 
cutive skill) are discussed with comparative brevity, and a 
very prolonged discussion of ideas of Truth absorbs the re- 
mainder of the volume. It is plain from the whole course 
of the treatment that Truth of the genuine kind, though pro- 
fessedly distinguished from beauty, is here treated as an 
element of excellence in art. Now in the second volume 
the scheme is formally pursued by the discussion of Ideas of 
Beauty as a co-ordinate element in the excellence of art ; but 
the plan seems to develop in the author's hands, and it may 
be a question whether in the very fairly systematic account — 
beginning with typical (i.e. pretty much what we have called 
formal) beauty, and proceeding to the various grades of 
" vital " beauty in an order that practically corresponds to the 
arrangement of Hegel or Hartmann — the " idea of beauty ' 
has not re-expanded so as to include the elements which were 
referred to in the previous volume as outside the region of 
the beautiful. Formally then, we have not escaped from the 



460 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



dualism which appears in Goethe, according to which beauty 
is only one among other excellences of art as art. Yet if we 
absorb the account of " Truth " in the first volume into the 
doctrine of the degrees of typical and vital beauty — all cha- 
racteristic — laid down in the second, and complete the whole 
conception by the analysis of the penetrative imagination, 
there will be little left to desire in the range ascribed to the 
beautiful. The immense predominance of instances in which 
ugliness is predicated of art, and the opinion of its extreme 
rarity in Nature, harmonise with the idea of its essence sug- 
gested in the present work. And even if it is wrong in theory 
to consider Nature as all but perfectly beautiful, and if we are 
to admit that by conflict and mutilation she produces ugliness 
as insuperable as any to be found in art or the works of man 
(which I do not believe), still the general idea that, as she is 
typical of reason, her fundamental principle is to be beautiful 1 
is far nearer to the truth than the borni perception which sees 
ugliness in the desolate, the quaint, the sombre, or the chaotic, 
and in all uncommon or transitional animal forms. The fact 
is, as Professor Baldwin Brown 2 has well pointed out, that 
the northern artist was the first to be in thorough sympathy 
with the wilder and more mysterious aspects of our globe. 

v. It may be asked in what sense the classifica- 

Classification of . J . . 

Material applied t ion by sensuous material is to apply to poetry. 

to Poetry. iy/ mt j s t h e mate rial of poetry ? I think that in 
replying we must take a distinction. 

It is best in all philosophy to start from the simple facts 
of denotation as prescribed by well-established connotation ; 
from the application, that is, of the term we are discussing, as 
determined by usage duly grounded in habit and experience. 
If we ask, then, whether poetry is a matter of fancy or im- 
agination, and independent of a particular kind of sensuous 
material, namely sonorous and rhythmical language, let us 
begin by putting the question whether there are any poems 
which are not in verse. Considering the English version of 
the Old Testament poetical books, and I suppose the originals 
of these books also, which are rather rhythmical than metrical, 
or other translations into prose from more distinctly metrical 
originals, we must accede to the opinion that only rhythm and 
not metre is essential to poetry. But even this is an indulgent 



Vol. ii. p. 63. 



2 The Fine Arts. Part III. 



SOUND IN POETRY. 



construction. In the full development of its nature what we call 
poetry unquestionably demands metre. Without quantity, or 
systematically recurring accent, or rhyme, we have not the 
definite signature by which the poet in versification stamps 
his imaginative expression with a form and harmony of its 
own and of his own. 

In this, then, the proper and accepted sense, poetry is an 
art distinguished from the other arts and characterised in it- 
self by its material, which is metrical or rhythmical language, 
and always a particular language, demanding a particular 
treatment no more the same with that of any other language 
than the treatment of wood can be the same with that of 
marble. 1 It is essential to poetry as such to have beautiful 
and characteristic sound. I do not therefore agree with those 
who set down the imagination as the true material of poetry. 
Of course there is a difference in degree. While no art can 
use wholly meaningless form, yet the pure formal beauty of 
sensuous material can be employed in formative art — I will 
venture no opinion about music — with a freedom from definite 
significance which would shock us in the use of language. As 
a limiting case, where language is used for purposes which 
are all but purely decorative, we may think of the "refrain," 
which is most effective in my judgment when it fills a place 
in the meaning and grammatical structure at each recurrence. 
Yet in some forms of verse it is not expected to do this 
but merely to bring a certain sound and a certain element 
of fancy before the mind at intervals, like the repeat of a 
pattern. On the whole, however, meaning is required from 
the forms of every art, and in abstaining from " nonsense 
verses," poetry is merely complying with the fundamental law 
of beauty. 

But though w T e hardly ever speak of a poet who is not an 
artist in language, nor of a poem which is not in words, it is 
true that in a sense poetry is the universal art ; or, to adhere 
more closely to usage, all art has the quality which we call 
"poetical." This is no doubt an attribute of imagination 
acting in a certain way, best described as the penetrative 
imagination of which we spoke above. All sensuous and 



1 Let anyone think for a moment of the difference between the Greek, the 
Latin and the German or English Hexameter, or the Greek and Latin Sapphic 
or Alcaic. 



462 



HISTORY OF AESTHETIC. 



concrete ideas, even abstract thought-sequences as embodied 
in a whole of individual and typical import, can be the material 
of this imagination, and therefore it enters into and is opera- 
tive in all recognition and production of the beautiful. But 
like most analogical usage, this employment of the term 
" poetical " is hazardous. There is always a risk of con- 
fusing the special with the general import, and of meaning 
by a ''painted" or a "musical" poem, not merely that the 
picture or piece of music shows a high degree of penetrative 
imagination and ideal feeling, but that it trenches on the 
province of poetry proper by telling a story or describing a 
character, which is rather a vice than a merit. 

To speak of poetical moods or ideas as occurring in the 
mind, without reference to art, is again a different usage from 
either of the above ; it only refers to moods and ideas fit for 
poetry, but not in fact thrown into poetic shape, just as a 
pictorial or musical idea may come into the mind which for 
any of various possible reasons we do not proceed to complete 
as a work of painting or music. 

It is by far the truest as well as the simplest view to take 
poetry proper according to its connotation in common speech, 
as confined to words in metrical or at least in peculiarly 
rhythmical arrangement, and to treat all other usages of the 
term as merely analogous in different degrees. I may fortify 
this position by the remark that while I do not deny the 
poetical quality of the Psalms, of certain passages in Carlyle, 
and of occasional brief portions in many prose authors, yet 
what is usually called poetical prose appears to me to be not 
poetry but rhetoric, a thing scarcely compatible with poetical 
quality, although in certain cases of passionate pleading they 
have a point of contact. I have not, of course, said that all 
verse is poetry ; I am only discussing how far poetry can 
extend into what is commonly called prose, not how far 
prose can extend into what is commonly called poetry. I 
presume that here again the penetrative imagination, with 
its attendant depth of ideal feeling, would be the difference 
required in addition to metrical language. This is the root of 
the Aristotelian universality " of poetry. 

4. I have now to the best of my power ful- 

Conclusion. r n 1 1 • r 1 r 1 t 1 

filled the promises of the first chapter. 1 have 
attempted to present the fundamental theory of beauty 
entertained by the ancients as the basis of the most pregnant 



ANCIENT AND MODERN MONISM. 



463 



conceptions reached by the moderns, 1 and have shown 
how aesthetic reflection passed from the formal to the char- 
acteristic, from the beauty of the picture-frame to the beauty 
of the picture, 2 following slowly upon the growth in width and 
penetration of the actual aesthetic consciousness or sense of 
the beautiful. We have seen how in this progression the 
sense of beauty has been almost infinitely extended, not by 
superficial generalisation but by the acquisition of a deeper 
sympathy. The predicate "ugly" has been in the main ex- 
pelled from the region of inanimate nature and almost from 
the non-human organic world and has been banished to the 
morbid or fraudulent productions of the human consciousness 
in the search for beauty. As specific doctrinal systems of the 
supernatural in contrast with the natural, and with them the 
theory of antecedent intellectual design in creation, have faded 
away, the vision of man has been sharpened for the direct 
appreciation of unity and immanent reason both in the world 
and in his own life. And it is possible now to understand 
how the unresting dualism of the romantic consciousness 
was an essential moment in the evolution of the spiritual 
monism of to-day from the naturalistic monism of classical 
Greece. Of this spiritual monism, in its formulated philoso- 
phical shape, we have traced the genesis in immediate con- 
nection with the speculative apprehension of the aesthetic 
synthesis. 

On the other hand, if we turn from the critical and reflec- 
tive appreciation of beauty to the realm of beautiful production, 
it is idle to deny that we find ourselves faced by a solution ol 
continuity such as in recorded history has had no precedent. 
The practice of art "for the people and by the people, a joy 
to the maker and the user," 3 no longer exists in the more 
civilised nations of the world, and pari passu with the spread 
of civilisation is ceasing to exist where it has hitherto survived. 
A few words on the present demands of ^Esthetic science and 
on the outlook and future of the concrete sense of beauty may 
fitly conclude this work. 

i. The divorce from history which is so marked 

Requirements . . 

of iEsthetic in recent methodising aesthetic ought not to con- 
science to-day. t j nue< j t j s q U j te w ithin the powers of a thorough 



1 See p. 4 supra. 2 See pp. 41-2 supra. 

6 Mr. William Morris passim. 



464 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



philosophical treatment to combine the achievements of formal 
analysis with a due regard for the joint evolution of content 
and expression, and for the possible non-permanence of 
aesthetic species. The spirit of Mr. Ruskin, Mr. Morris, 
and Mr. Pater, 1 with something of the historical system of 
Hegel, and the precise lucidity of Herbart and Helmholtz, 
might find their place in a philosophical science, employing 
the same variety of intellectual organa with modern psycho- 
logy, or with biology in its most comprehensive signification. 
Of one side, and that the chief side, of such a treatment 
Carriere has furnished a splendid example in his Art in its 
Connection with the Development of Culture ; but in order 
rightly to indicate this connection it cannot be necessary to 
compile a complete history of civilisation and place it by the 
side of a complete history of art. More division of labour 
than this must surely be possible, and an over-estimate of the 
magnitude of the enterprise leads by a natural reaction to the 
abundance of commonplace and second-hand work from which 
Carriere is not free. 

For the purpose which I have indicated the first necessity 
is to open our eyes to the present condition of the arts, and to 
ascertain what in them is living, and what species, under 
present conditions, are dead or in suspended animation. I 
know nothing more wearisome than the purely generalised and 
systematic discussion of the epic and the drama, 2 without allu- 
sion to the times of their greatness and the conditions of their 
genesis. Taking the drama, for our purpose, to mean genuine 
stage-plays that have permanent literary value, we see at once 
that tragedy at all events has flourished but twice in the world's 
history, and that only for brief periods, namely, for three- 
quarters of a century at Athens, and for a century and a half 
in England and France together. The comic and bourgeois 
drama no doubt has a wider range, but also the total quantity 
of comedy which to-day survives in literature belongs, I 
imagine, to quite definite and not very protracted periods. 



1 I am aware that the work of the philosopher must be inferior in tact and 
original feeling for art to that of the skilled art-critic. But unless he can 
gather something of genuine sympathy and insight, his actual work qua philo- 
sophy will be spoilt by his simply not knowing what beauty means. 

2 Hegel has the excuse of having lived when the Greek renaissance was 
in its first flush of splendour, and when the Goethe-Schiller drama seemed to 
herald a revival of the theatre. 



QUESTIONS FOR ESTHETIC TO-DAY. 



465 



As for epics, the name is taken from the Iliad and Odyssey 
par excellence, and every subsequent epic has in fact been a 
new species, differing from these and from all the rest in 
significance, in national import, and in conditions of genesis. 

What are our forms of poetry to-day ? In what relation do 
they and the conditions from which they spring stand to the 
great works of the past and the conditions from which they 
sprang ? To whom do they appeal ? Do Lessing, Goethe, 
and Schiller hold the popular stage in Germany to-day ? Do 
Racine, Corneille, and Moliere hold the stage in France ? If 
not, then, in each case, why not, and what has taken their 
place, or has anything done so? Do the people care for drama 
that has literary value ? W ould they care for it if they could 
get it ? These are not questions of otiose curiosity. The 
answers depend on simple fact, but their import is the 
material for philosophy. It is the pervading and fundamental 
problem of content and expression. 

The same kind of investigation might be applied to other 
kinds of art, not of course with purely statistical 1 methods 
and results, but in order to ascertain in what impulse it origi- 
nates and to what need it corresponds, and to correlate the 
feeling of the beautiful, and the connection of content and 
expression, thus revealed, with the evolution of the aesthetic 
consciousness down to the present time. The novel, or 
bourgeois epic, would have to be considered in its peculiar 
adaptation to the conditions of modern life, which are in many 
ways so hostile to the formative arts. "How should any 
man," it may be said, " desire to-day to address his fellows 
otherwise than through the printed book, by which his 
thoughts are carried at once, exactly as he sets them down, 
all over the civilized world ? Had Leonardo lived in this cen- 
tury, he would have been a great writer of criticism." 

More might be done, I feel confident, for the analysis of 
musical expression than has yet been attempted. The subject 
has fallen to the ground between rival theorists. Musicians 
have rightly and naturally refused to believe that the tone- 
structure can be rendered into common language, but in 
practice, though not perhaps in theory, have tried to endow it 



1 Though statistics would be interesting and valuable. For whom and by 
whom are the thousands of canvases painted that are sent in to the Academy 
year by year ? 

H H 



-466 



HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



with imitative powers ; formalists have attempted to assimi- 
late all musical expression to the single relation of consonance 
and dissonance ; associationists have approached the problem 
from the still more trivial and abstract observation of cadences 
resembling those of emotional speech. And thus it is left to 
the unmusical philosopher to protest that there must be more 
in it than all this put together ; that the consideration should 
be initiated positively, not negatively (i.e. by mere transference 
from, and comparison with this or that which is not music) ; 
that in music we have a material or medium with certain per- 
fectly definite properties, different from those of any other 
sensuous vehicle, and obviously lending itself to particular 
kinds of combinations, transitions, idealised motions with a 
character impressed on them which is more than that of bare 
motion, more even than bare rhythmical motion ; and pervad- 
ing the whole, both in, co-existence and in succession, an 
audible lawfulness and necessary precision of structure, as 
clear and as mysterious as that of nature herself. Surely it 
must be possible, following upon the track of Plato, Schopen- 
hauer and Hanslick, to steer between the hazards of denying, 
with Mr. Gurney, that any explanation or analysis can at all 
unveil the mystery of melody and harmony, and of asserting 
with the formalist or the associationist that it is all a question 
of smooth intervals or of suggested cadences of voice. Surely 
the character, the typical spirit and mode of combination, trans- 
ition, repetition and so forth, within important musical works, 
could so far be detected by a subtle but impartial criticism as 
to throw light on the connection of expression and content 
within the region of musical beauty. 1 

In the aesthetic of the future Psychology has, as I have 
already indicated, a leading part to play. Though I do not 
believe in aesthetic as the analysis of expression apart from the 
analysis of content, it appears that to analyse the pleasurable 
nature of utterance or expression will be a necessary pendant 
to analysing the kind of content which, in the course of evolu- 
tion, comes to demand embodiment or appreciation. We spoke 
of the law of economy in attention, as connected with the 
principle of economy in graceful movement, and ultimately 



1 The notes which I print as Appendix II. are to my mind examples of the 
sort of analysis required. Of course there may be much criticism of this kind 
in specialist works on music with which I am not acquainted. 



QUESTIONS FOR /ESTHETIC TO-DAY. 467 



with the Platonic and Aristotelian conception of the necessary 
relation between whole and part. Can this or similar transla- 
tions into the psychical movement be applied to other and 
more complex contents ? Is it not by more than mere repro- 
ductive memory, is it not rather by a true sense of indwelling 
properties, that the hand of the free workman is guided to the 
springing curve whose peculiar law of formation causes it to be 
felt at once as expressing the very joy of vitality ? What is 
the nature of the delight in simple colours, and is.it an illusion 
to suppose that we perceive them as simple ? What of tones 
in the same way, and of combinations both of colour and of 
tone ? Can anything be done with them analogous to what 
has been done in the comparison of circular and catenary 
curves ? What is the connection between sense and sound in 
verse ? Does not the sense, by suggested emotion, affect the 
sound ? Is the relation of splendid versification to the expres- 
sion of profound ideal feeling rooted in the nature of mind ? 
How is it distinguished in regard to artistic truth from the case 
in which the passion wholly lames the utterance ? Under 
what conditions does emotion disable, and under what condi- 
tions does it stimulate the expressive power ? Again, what are 
the effects of scientific training upon aesthetic capacity ? Is 
the deficient visualisation of ideas, said to be observed among 
men of abstract intellectual pursuits, an indication of deep- 
seated hostility between the two modes of mind, or only a plea 
for more vital and concrete training in intellectual things ? 
How does the general theory of pleasure and pain connect 
with the aesthetic theory of beauty and ugliness ? In short, 
what is the psychical connection between content and ex- 
pression, or between the nature of either of these and its 
pleasurableness ? 
The Future of ii. It is impossible to believe that just as the 
sense of beauty has become deeper and stronger 1 
than ever before, the productive capacity of art has received 



1 I quote an excellent statement of the gain which has come to the modern 
sense of beauty by a deeper and wider sympathy. I refuse to believe, with 
the gifted author, that it involves a corresponding loss. " Haggard Egdon 
appealed to a subtler and scarcer instinct, to a more recently learnt emotion, 
than that which responds to the sort of beauty called charming and fair. 

" Indeed, it is a question if the exclusive reign of this orthodox beauty is not 
approaching its last quarter. The new Vale of Tempe may be a gaunt waste 
in Thule : human souls may find themselves in closer and closer harmony 



4 68 



HISTORY OF AESTHETIC. 



its deathblow. But it is idle to look back, or to deny that if, 
of the present hostile conditions, there are many that may and 
must be removed, yet many again are, and must be permanent. 
The basis of life will always henceforward be intellectual and 
historical, not naive and natural, except in the sense of a second 
nature. No single tradition can ever again enthrall the world 
from father to son in a mere routine of faith, and bind the 
artist-workman securely to his one good custom as the 
only rule he knows. The soul has won its intellectual liberty, 
and with it an infinite capacity for making mistakes, and this 
it will never surrender. We shall increasingly employ the 
printing press and the machine. Formative art can never 
again be the chief instructor of peoples. It is idle to rail against 
conditions demonstrably inherent in a life that has behind it 
two thousand active years of art, science, religion, and philo- 
sophy. 

Yet even from an aesthetic standpoint these losses are not 
without their gain. Even machinery has its good tidings for 
us, if rightly used. Many of the reforming sestheticians seem 
to me to forget that it is worse to do by hand what can be 
done well by machinery, than to do by machinery what can 
only be done by hand. In the latter case you try to make a 
machine do a man s work, which is impossible. In the former 
you make a man do a machine's work, which is immoral. 
" Whatever can be done (that is properly done) by machinery, 
ought to be done by machinery." 1 The present system com- 
bines both evils. But what is needed is not to join the ranks 
of the machine-breakers, but to draw the line rightly between 
mechanical and non-mechanical production. Some critics are 
fond of saying that we make nothing well now but the instru- 
ments of war. They omit one class of appliances, the instru- 
ments of science. A compound microscope of the present 
day is one of the greatest triumphs of intellect in workman- 
ship that the world has ever seen. We must not forget these 
things, for they mean a new power in the human beings who 



with external things wearing a sombreness distasteful to our race when it was 
young. The time seems near, if it has not actually arrived, when the 
chastened sublimity of a moor, a sea, or a mountain will be all of nature 
that is absolutely in keeping with the moods of the more thinking among 
mankind." Hardy's Return of the Native. 
1 Henniker's Trifles for Travellers. 



THE OUTLOOK. 



469 



make them. Exaggeration is always harmful, besides being 
false. 

And if we are surrounded by ugliness of our own making, 
we have a larger and keener sense of beauty. If the habit of 
reading threatens the position of formative art, the world of 
literature is open to all men, as never before, while music is a 
comparatively recent gift to humanity. A comparison with 
the great epochs of the past may give us hope. Our finest 
spirits feel to-day much what Aristophanes felt when he 
attacked Euripides, and when it seemed to him that poetic art 
in its noblest sense had departed to the world below. So a 
Renaissance critic might have felt, with greater justice, after 
the death of Michael Angelo. It is true that in the last hun- 
dred years, although certain reservations are to be made such as 
I have pointed out, with reference to music, landscape, portrait 
painting, and poetic art, yet the discord has cut deeper than 
ever before, and the popular art-tradition is interrupted. But 
the mind is stronger to-day, and the self is fuller, and we 
know that it lives by movement and not by fixity. The 
deeper discord can therefore be borne, and is a. testimony 
to the strength of the life which it does not fatally maim. 
Naturally, it will take a longer time to resolve, and we -cannot 
anticipate in what shape the resolution may come. But in 
spite of all hostile conditions, man is more human now than 
ever he was before, and he will find out the way to satisfy 
his imperious need for beauty. 



APPENDIX I, 



DIVISION OF THE SUBJECT. 

In order that the reader may have fully before him the structure of Hegel's 
partly analytical classification of art-forms, 1 I reproduce here in extenso the 
closing section of the Introduction to his yEsthetik, Vol. i. pp. 89-114, from 
the translation with notes, which I published some years ago. 2 

1. It has already been said that the content of art is the Idea, and that its 
form lies in the plastic use of images accessible to sense. These two sides art 
has to reconcile into a full and united totality. The first attribution which 
this involves is the requirement that the content, which is to be offered to 
artistic representation, shall show itself to be in its nature worthy of such 
representation. Otherwise we only obtain a bad combination, whereby a 
content that will not submit to plasticity and to external presentation, is 
forced into that form, and a matter which is in its nature prosaic is expected 
to find an appropriate mode of manifestation in the form antagonistic to its 
nature. 

The second requirement, which is derivable from this first, demands of the 
content of art that it should not be anything abstract in itself. This does not 
mean that it must be concrete as the sensuous is concrete in contrast to 
everything spiritual and intellectual, these being taken as in themselves simple 
and abstract. For everything that has genuine truth in the mind as well as 
in nature is concrete in itself, and has, in spite of its universality, nevertheless, 
both subjectivity and particularity within it. If we say, e.g. of God that he 
is simply One, the supreme Being as such, we have only enunciated a lifeless 
abstraction of the irrational understanding. Such a God, as he himself is not 
apprehended in his concrete truth, can afford no material for art, least of all 
for plastic art. Hence the Jews and the Turks have not been able to repre- 
sent their God, who does not even amount to such an abstraction of the 
understanding, in the positive way in which Christians have done so. For 
God in Christianity is conceived in His truth, and therefore, as in Himself 
thoroughly concrete, as a person, as a subject, 3 and more closely determined, 
as mind or spirit. What He is as spirit unfolds itself to the religious appre- 
hension as the Trinity of Persons, which at the same time in relation with 



1 Compare p. 352 supra. 

2 The Introduction to Hegel's "Philosophy of Fine Art," translated into English. Kegan 
Paul, Trench & Co., 1886. 

3 It is natural for a reader to ask in what person or subject God is conceived to have 
reality. It appears certain to me that Hegel, when he writes thus, is referring to the self- 
consciousness of individual human beings as constituting, and reflecting on, an ideal unity 
between them. This may seem to put a non-natural meaning on the term "person" or 
" subject," as if the common element of a number of intelligences could be a single person. 
It is obvious that the question hinges on the degree in which a unity that is not sensuous 
but ideal can be effective and actual. I can only say here, that the more we consider the 
nature of ideal unity the higher we shall rate its capabilities. 

471 



472 



APPENDIX I. 



itself is One. Here is essentiality, universality, and particularity, together with 
their reconciled unity ; and it is only such unity that constitutes the concrete. 
Now, as a content in order to possess truth at all must be of this concrete 
nature, art demands the same concreteness, because a mere abstract universal 
has not in itself the vocation to advance to particularity and phenomenal 
manifestation and to unity with itself therein. 

If a true and therefore concrete content is to have corresponding to it a 
sensuous form and modelling, this sensuous form must, in the third place, be 
no less emphatically something individual, wholly concrete in itself, and one. 
The character of concreteness as belonging to both elements of art, to the 
content as to the representation, is precisely the point in which both may 
coincide and correspond to one another ; as, for instance, the natural shape 
of the human body is such a sensuous concrete as is capable of representing 
spirit, which is concrete in itself, and of displaying itself in conformity there- 
with. Therefore we ought to abandon the idea that it is a mere matter of 
accident that an actual phenomenon of the external world is chosen to furnish 
a shape thus conformable to truth. Art does not appropriate this form either 
because it simply finds it existing or because there is none other. The con- 
crete content itself involves the element of external and actual, we may say 
indeed of sensible manifestation. But in compensation this sensuous concrete, 
in which a content essentially belonging to mind expresses itself, is in its own 
nature addressed to the inward being ; its external element of shape, whereby 
the content is made perceptible and imaginable, has the aim of existing purely 
for the heart and mind. This is the only reason for which content and 
artistic shape are fashioned in conformity with each other. The mere sensuous 
concrete, external nature as such, has not this purpose for its exclusive ground 
of origin. The birds' variegated plumage shines unseen, and their song dies 
away unheard, the Cereus 1 which blossoms only for a night withers without 
having been admired in the wilds of southern forests, and these forests, jungles 
of the most beautiful and luxuriant vegetation, with the most odorous and 
aromatic perfumes, perish and decay no less unenjoyed. The work of art has 
not such a naive self-centred being, but is essentially a question, an address 
to the responsive heart, an appeal to affections and to minds. 

Although the artistic bestowal of sensuous form is in this respect not 
accidental, yet on the other hand it is not the highest mode of apprehending 
the spiritually concrete. Thought is a higher mode than representation by 
means of the sensuous concrete. But although in a relative sense abstract, 
yet it must not be one-sided but concrete thinking, in order to be true and 
rational. Whether a given content has sensuous artistic representation for its 
adequate form, or in virtue of its nature essentially demands a higher and 
more spiritual embodiment, is a distinction that displays itself at once, if, for 
instance, we compare the Greek gods with God as conceived according to 
Christian ideas. The Greek god is not abstract but individual, and is closely 
akin to the natural human shape j the Christian God is equally a concrete 
personality, but in the mode of pure spiritual existence, and is to be known 
as mind 2 and in mind. His medium of existence is therefore essentially in- 
ward knowledge and not external natural form, by means of which He can 
only be represented imperfectly, and not in the whole depth of His idea. 

But inasmuch as the task of art is to represent the idea to direct perception 



1 Facke/distel=" Torch thistle," a plant of the genus Cereus, Nat. Order Cactacece. 

2 Or 1 ' as spirit and in spirit." 



APPENDIX I. 



473 



in sensuous shape, and not in the form of thought or of pure spirituality as 
such, and seeing that this work of representation has its value and dignity in 
the correspondence and the unity of the two sides, i.e. of the Idea and its 
plastic embodiment, it follows that the level and excellency of art in attaining 
a realization adequate to its ideal, 1 must depend upon the grade of inwardness 
and unity with which Idea and Shape display themselves as fused into one. 

Thus the higher truth is spiritual being that has attained a shape adequate 
to the conception of spirit. This is what furnishes the principle of division 
for the science of art. For before the mind can attain the true notion of its 
absolute essence, it has to traverse a course of stages whose ground is in this 
idea itself ; and to this evolution of the content with which it supplies itself, 
there corresponds an evolution, immediately connected therewith, of the 
plastic forms of art, under the shape of which the mind as artist presents to 
itself the consciousness of itself. 

This evolution within the art-spirit has again in its own nature two sides. 
In the first place the development itself is a spiritual 2 and universal one, in 
so far as the graduated series of definite conceptions of the world as the definite 
but comprehensive consciousness of nature, man and God, gives itself artistic 
shape ; and, in the second place, this universal development of art is obliged 
to provide itself with external existence and sensuous form, and the definite 
modes of the sensuous art-existence are themselves a totality of necessary 
distinctions in the realm of art — which are the several arts. It is true, indeed, 
that the necessary kinds of artistic representation are on the one hand qua 
spiritual of a very general nature, and not restricted to any one material ; 3 
while sensuous existence contains manifold varieties of matter. But as this 
latter, like the mind, has the Idea potentially for its inner soul, it follows from 
this that particular sensuous materials have a close affinity and secret accord 
with the spiritual distinctions and types of art presentation. 

In its completeness, however, our science divides itself into three principal 
portions. 

First, we obtain a general part. It has for its content and object the 
universal Idea of artistic beauty — this beauty being conceived as the Ideal — 
together with the nearer relation of the latter both to nature and to subjective 
artistic production. 

Secondly, there develops itself out of the idea of artistic beauty a particular 
part, in as far as the essential differences which this idea contains in itself 
evolve themselves into a scale of particular plastic 4 forms. 

In the third place there results a final part, which has for its subject the 
individualization of artistic beauty, that consists in the advance of art to the 



1 The idea of art. 

2 The two evolutions are, speaking roughly, (i.) that of the subject-matter; (ii. ) that of 
the particular mode of art : (i.) e.g. you have Egyptian, Greek, Christian religion, etc., with 
the corresponding views and sentiments, each in its own relation to art ; (ii. ) you have, as a 
cross division to the former, the several arts — sculpture, music, poetry, etc., each having its 
special ground and warrant. 

3 He is asking himself why sound or paint, etc., should correspond to one type of art as 
theoretically defined — this being intellectual, not sensuous, at root — and answers that these 
media qua natural objects have, though more latent than in works of art, an iniDort and 
purpose of their own, which reveals itself in their suitability to particular forms of art. 

4 " Gestaltungsformen." I use "plastic" all through in a pregnant sense, as one speaks 
of plastic fancy, etc. : meaning ideally determinate, and fit for translating into pictures, 
poetry, etc. These "plastic forms" are varying modifications of the subject-matter of art. 



474 



APPENDIX I. 



sensuous realization of its shapes and its self-completion as a system of the 
several arts and their genera and species. 

2. With respect to the first part, we must begin by recalling to mind, in 
order to make the sequel intelligible, that the Idea qua the beautiful in art is 
not the Idea as such, in the mode in which a metaphysical logic apprehends 
it as the absolute, but the Idea as developed into concrete form fit for reality, 
and as having entered into immediate and adequate unity with this reality. 
For the Idea as such, although it is the essentially and actually true, is yet the 
truth only in its generality which has not yet taken objective shape ; but the 
Idea as the beautiful in art is at once the Idea when specially determined 
as in its essence individual reality, and also an individual shape of reality 
essentially destined to embody and reveal the Idea. This amounts to enunci- 
ating the requirement that the Idea, and its plastic mould as concrete reality, 
are to be made completely adequate to one another. When reduced to such 
form the Idea, as a reality moulded in conformity with the conception of the 
Idea, is the Ideal. The problem of this conformity might, to begin with, be 
understood in the sense that any Idea would serve, so long as the actual 
shape, it did not matter what shape, represented this particular Idea and no 
other. But if so, the required truth of the Ideal is confounded with mere 
correctness, which consists in the expression of any meaning whatever in 
appropriate fashion so that its import may be readily recognised in the shape 
created. The Ideal is not to be thus understood. Any content whatever 
may attain to being represented quite adequately, judged by the standard of 
its own nature, but it does not therefore gain the right to claim the artistic 
beauty of the Ideal. Compared indeed with ideal beauty, even the presenta- 
tion will in such a case appear defective. From this point of view we must 
remark to begin with, what cannot be proved till later, that the defects of a 
work of art are not to be regarded simply as always due, for instance, to 
individual unskilfulness. Defectiveness of form arises from defectiveness of 
content. So, for example, the Chinese, Indians, and Egyptians in their artistic 
shapes, their forms of deities, and their idols, never got beyond a formless 
phase, or one of a vicious and false definiteness of form, and were unable to 
attain genuine beauty ; because their mythological ideas, the content and 
thought of their works of art, were as yet indeterminate in themselves, or of a 
vicious determinateness, and did not consist in the content that is absolute in 
itself. The more that works of art excel in true beauty of presentation, the 
more profound is the inner truth of their content and thought. And in deal- 
ing with this point, we have not to think merely perhaps of the greater or 
lesser skill with which the natural forms as given in external reality are appre- 
hended and imitated. For in certain stages of art-consciousness and of 
representation, the distortion and disfigurement of natural structures is not 
unintentional technical inexpertness and want of skill, but intentional altera- 
tion, which emanates from the content that is in consciousness, and is 
required thereby. Thus, from this point of view, there is such a thing as im- 
perfect art, which may be quite perfect, both technicallyand in other respects, 
in its determinate sphere, yet reveals itself to be defective when compared 
with the conception of art as such, and with the Ideal. Only in the highest 
art are the Idea and the representation genuinely adequate to one another, in 
the sense that the outward shape given to the Idea is in itself essentially and 
actually the true shape, because the content of the Idea, which that shape ex- 
presses, is itself the true and real content. It is a corollary from this, as we 
indicated above, that the Idea must be defined in and through itself as con- 



APPENDIX I. 



475 



crete totality, and thereby possess in itself the principle and standard of its 
particularization and determination in external appearance. For example, 
the Christian imagination will be able to represent God only in human form 
and with man's - intellectual expression, because it is herein that God Himself 
is completely known in Himself as mind. Determinateness is, as it were, the 
bridge to phenomenal existence. Where this determinateness is not totality 
derived from the Idea itself, where the Idea is not conceived as self-determin- 
ing and self-particularizing, the Idea remains abstract and has its determinate- 
ness, and therefore the principle that dictates its particular and exclusively 
appropriate mode of presentation, not in itself but external to it. Therefore, 
the Idea when still abstract has even its shape external, and not dictated by 
itself. The Idea, however, which is concrete in itself bears the principle 
of its mode of manifestation within itself, and is by that means the free 
process of giving shape to itself. Thus it is only the truly concrete Idea 
that can generate the true shape, and this correspondence of the two is the 
Ideal. 

3. Now because the Idea is in this fashion concrete unity, it follows that 
this unity can enter into the art-consciousness only by the expansion and 
re-conciliation of the particularities of the Idea, and it is through this evolution 
that artistic beauty comes to possess a totality of particular stages and forms. 
Therefore, after we have studied the beauty of art in itself and on its own 
merits, we must see how beauty as a whole breaks up into its particular deter- 
minations. This gives, as our second part, the doctrine of the types of art, 
These forms find their genesis in the different modes of grasping the Idea as 
artistic content, whereby is c6nditioned a difference of the form in which it 
manifests itself. Hence the types of art are nothing but the different relations 
of content and shape, relations which emanate from the Idea itself, and furnish 
thereby the true basis of division for this sphere. For the principle of division 
must always be contained in that conception whose particularization and 
division is in question. 

We have here to consider three relations of the Idea to its outward shaping. 1 

(a) First, the Idea gives rise to the beginning of Art when, being itself still 
in its indistinctness and obscurity, or in vicious untrue determinateness, it is 
made the import of artistic creations. As indeterminate it does not yet possess 
in itself that individuality which the Ideal demands ; its abstractness and one- 
sidedness leave its shape to be outwardly bizarre and defective. The first 
form of art is therefore rather a mere search after plastic portrayal than a 
capacity of genuine representation. The Idea has not yet found the true 
form even within itself, and therefore continues to be merely the struggle and 
aspiration thereafter. In general terms we may call this form the Symbolic 
form of art. In it the abstract Idea has its outward shape external to itself 2 
in natural sensuous matter, with which the process of shaping begins, and 
from which, qua outward expression, it is inseparable. 

Natural objects are thus primarily left unaltered, and yet at the same time 
invested with the substantial Idea as their significance, so that they receive the 



1 " Gestalitmg.''' I do not think this means the process of shaping, but the shapes taken 
collectively. 

2 I.e. not in a separate ideal shape devoted to it. He means that man takes a stock or 
stone as representation or symbol of the divine, and as there is no real connection between 
divinity and the stone, it may either be left untouched and umhaped, or be hewn into any 
bizarre or arbitrary shape that comes to hand : see next paragraph. 



476 



APPENDIX I. 



vocation of expressing it, and claim to be interpreted as though the Idea 
itself were present in them. At the root of this is the fact that natural objects 
have in them an aspect in which they are capable of representing a universal 
meaning. But as an adequate correspondence is not yet possible, this refer- 
ence can only concern an abstract attribute, as when a lion is used to mean 
strength. 

On the other hand, this abstractness of the relation brings to consciousness 
no less strongly the foreignness of the Idea to natural phenomena ; and the 
Idea, having no other reality to express it, expatiates in all these shapes, seeks 
itself in them in all their unrest and proportion, but nevertheless does not find 
them adequate to itself. Then it proceeds to exaggerate the natural shapes and 
the phenomena of reality into indefiniteness and disproportion, to intoxicate 
itself in them, to seethe and ferment in them, to do violence to them, to 
distort and explode them into unnatural shapes, and strives by the variety, 
hugeness, and splendour of the forms employed 1 to exalt the phenomenon 
to the level of the Idea. For the Idea is here still more or less indeter- 
minate and non-plastic, but the natural objects are in their shape thoroughly 
determinate. 

Hence, in view of the unsuitablity of the two elements to each other, the 
relation of the Idea to objective reality becomes a negative one, for the former, 
as in its nature inward, 2 is unsatisfied with such an externality, and as being 
its inner universal substance 3 perists in exaltation or Sublimity beyond and 
above all this inadequate abundance of shapes. In virtue of this sublimity 
the natural phenomena and the human shapes and incidents are accepted, and 
left as they were, though at the same time understood to be inadequate to 
their significance, which is exalted far above every earthly content. 

These aspects may be pronounced in general terms to constitute the 
character of the primitive artistic pantheism of the East, which either charges 
even the meanest objects with the absolute import, or again coerces nature 
with violence into the expression of its view. By this means it becomes 
bizarre, grotesque, and tasteless, or turns the infinite but abstract freedom 
of the substantive Idea disdainfully against all phenomenal being as dull and 
evanescent. By such means the import cannot be completely embodied in 
the expression, and in spite of all aspiration and endeavour the reciprocal 
inadequacy of shape and Idea remains insuperable. This may be taken as 
the first form of art, — Symbolic art with its aspiration, its disquiet, 4 its mystery 
and its sublimity. 

(/?) In the second form of art, which we propose to call " Classical" the 
double defect of symbolic art is cancelled. The plastic shape of symbolic 
art is imperfect, because, in the first place, the Idea in it only enters into 
consciousness in abstract determinateness or indeterminateness, and, in the 
second place, this must always make the conformity of' shape to import 
defective, and in its turn merely abstract. The classical form of art is the 
solution of this double difficulty ; it is the free and adequate embodiment 



1 This description is probably directed, in the first place, to the Indian representation of 
deities, and would apply to those of many barbaric religions. But its truth may be very 
simply verified in daily observation of the first attempts of the uneducated at plastic presen- 
tation of their ideas, where costliness, ingenuity, labour, or size take the place of beauty. 

2 " Sie ah Inner es." 

3 I.e. an idea or purpose which gives these partial and defective representations all the 
meaning they have, although they are incapable of really expressing it. 

4 " Gahrung" lit. "fermentation." 



APPENDIX I. 



477 



of the Idea in the shape that, according to its conception, is peculiarly 
appropriate to the Idea itself. With it, therefore, the Idea is capable of 
entering into free and complete accord. Hence, the classical type of art 
is the first to afford the production and intuition of the completed Ideal, and 
to establish it as a realized fact. 

The conformity, however, of notion and reality in classical art must not be 
taken in the purely formal sense of the agreement of a content with the 
external shape given to it, any more than this could be the case with the 
Ideal itself. Otherwise every copy from nature, and every type of countenance, 
every landscape, flower, or scene, etc., which forms the purport of any repre- 
sentation, would be at once made classical by the agreement which it displays 
between form and content. On the contrary, in classical art the peculiarity 
of the content consists in being itself concrete, and, as such, the concrete 
spiritual; for only the spiritual is the truly inner self. To suit such a content, 
then, we must search out that in Nature which on its own merits belongs to 
the essence and actuality of the mind. It must be the absolute 1 notion that 
invented the shape appropriate to concrete mind, so that the subjective notion 
— in this case the spirit of art — has merely found it, and brought it, as an 
existence possessing natural shape, into accord with free individual spirituality. 2 
This shape, with which the Idea as spiritual — as individually determinate 
spirituality — invests itself when manifested as a temporal phenomenon, is 
the human form. Personification and anthropomorphism have often been 
decried as a degradation of the spiritual ; but art, in as far as its end is to 
bring before perception the spiritual in sensuous form, must advance to such 
anthropomorphism, as it is only in its proper body that mind is adequately 
revealed to sense. The migration of souls is in this respect a false abstrac- 
tion, 3 and physiology ought to have made it one of its axioms that life had 
necessarily in its evolution to attain to the human shape, as the sole sensuous 
phenomenon that is appropriate to mind. The human form is employed in 
the classical type of art not as mere sensuous existence, but exclusively as the 
existence and physical form corresponding to mind, and is therefore exempt 
from all the deficiencies of what is merely sensuous, and from the contingent 
finiteness of phenomenal existence. The outer shape must be thus purified 
in order to express in itself a content adequate to itself ; and again, if the 
conformity of import and content is to be complete, the spiritual mean- 
ing which is the content must be of a particular kind. It must, that is 
to say, be qualified to express itself completely in the physical form of man, 
without projecting into another world beyond the scope of such an expression 
in sensuous and bodily terms. This condition has the effect that Mind is by 
it at once specified as a particular case of mind, as human mind, and not as 
simply absolute and eternal, inasmuch as mind in this latter sense is incapable 
of proclaiming and expressing itself otherwise than as intellectual being. 4 

Out of this latter point arises, in its turn, the defect which brings about 



1 " Der urspriingliche Begriff," lit. " the original notion." 

2 I.e. God or the Universe invented man to be the expression of mind ; art finds him, and 
adapts his shape to the artistic embodiment of mind as concentrated in individual instances. 

3 Because it represents the soul as independent of an appropriate body — the human soul as 
capable of existing in a beast's body. 

4 " Geistigkeit." "The nature of thought, mind, or spirit." It cannot be here rendered 
by mind or spirit, because these words make us think of an isolated individual, a mind or 
soul, and neglect the common spiritual or intellectual nature, which is referred to by the 
author. 



478 



APPENDIX I. 



the dissolution of classical art, and demands a transition into a third and 
higher form, viz. into the romantic form of art. 

(y) The romantic form of art destroys the completed union of the Idea 
and its reality, and recurs, though in a higher phase, to that difference and 
antagonism of two aspects which was left unvanquished by symbolic art. The 
classical type attained the highest excellence, of which the sensuous embodi- 
ment of art is capable ; and if it is in any way defective, the defect is in art 
as a whole, i.e. in the limitation of its sphere. This limitation consists in the 
fact that art as such takes for its object Mind — the conception of which 
is infinite concrete universality — in the shape of sensuous concreteness, and in 
the classical phase sets up the perfect amalgamation of spiritual and sensuous 
existence as a Conformity of the two. Now, as a matter of fact, in such an 
amalgamation Mind cannot be represented according to its true notion. For 
mind is the infinite subjectivity of the Idea, which, as absolute inwardness, 1 
is not capable of finding free expansion in its true nature on condition of 
remaining transposed into a bodily medium as the existence appropriate to it. 

As an escape from such a condition the romantic form of art in its turn dis- 
solves the inseparable unity of the classical phase, because it has won a 
significance which goes beyond the classical form of art and its mode of ex- 
pression. 2 This significance — if we may recall familiar ideas — coincides with 
what Christianity declares to be true of God as Spirit, in contradistinction to 
the Greek faith in gods which forms the essential and appropriate content for 
classical art. In Greek art the concrete import is potentially, but not ex- 
plicitly, the unity of the human and divine nature ; a unity which, just 
because it is purely immediate 3 and not explicit, is capable of adequate mani- 
festation in an immediate and sensuous mode. The Greek god is the object 
of naive intuition and sensuous imagination. His shape is, therefore, the 
bodily shape of man. The circle of his power and of his being is individual 
and individually limited. In relation with the subject, 4 he is, therefore, an 
essence and a power with which the subject's inner being is merely in latent 
unity, not itself possessing this unity as inward subjective knowledge. Now 
the higher stage is the knowledge of this latent unity, which as latent is the 
import of the classical form of art, and capable of perfect representation in 
bodily shape. The elevation of the latent or potential into self-conscious 
knowledge produces an enormous difference. It is the infinite difference 
which, e.g., separates man as such from the animals. Man is animal, but 
even in his animal functions he is not confined within the latent and 
potential as the animal is, but becomes conscious of them, learns to know 
them, and raises them — as, for instance, the process of digestion — into self- 
conscious science. By this means Man breaks the boundary of merely 
potential and immediate consciousness, so that just for the reason that he 
knows himself to be animal, he ceases to be animal and, as mind, attains to 
self-knowledge. 

If in the above fashion the unity of the human and divine nature, which 
in the former phase was potential, is raised from an immediate to a conscious 
unity, it follows that the true medium for the reality of this content is no 



1 It is the essence of mind or thought not to have its parts outside one another. The so- 
called terms of a judgment are a good instance of parts in thought which are inward to each 
other. 

2 Compare Browning's Old Pictures in Florence. 

3 I.e. in the form of feeling and imagination — not reflected upon. 

4 Subject, i.e. conscious individual person. 



APPENDIX I. 



479 



longer the sensuous immediate existence of the spiritual, the human bodily 
shape, but self-conscious inward intelligence. 1 Now, Christianity brings God 
before our intelligence as spirit, or mind — not as particularized individual 
spirit, but as absolute, in spirit and in truth. And for this reason Christ- 
ianity retires from the sensuousness of imagination into intellectual inward- 
ness, and makes this, not bodily shape, the medium and actual existence of 
its significance. So, too, the unity of the human and divine nature is a 
conscious unity, only to be realized by spiritual knowledge and in spirit. 
Thus the new content, won by this unity, is not inseparable from sensuous 
■representation, as if that were adequate to it, but is freed from this immediate 
existence, which has to be posited 2 as negative, absorbed, and reflected into 
the spiritual unity. In this way, romantic art must be considered as art 
transcending itself, while remaining within the artistic sphere and in artistic 
form. 

Therefore, in short, we may abide by the statement that in this third stage 
the object (of art) is free, concrete intellectual being, which has the function 
of revealing itself as spiritual existence for the inward 3 world of spirit. In 
conformity with such an object-matter, art cannot work for sensuous percep- 
tion. It must address itself to the inward mind, which coalesces with its 
object simply and as though this were itself, 4 to the subjective inwardness, to 
the heart, the feeling, which, being spiritual, aspires to freedom within itself, 
and seeks and finds its reconciliation only in the spirit within. It is this 
inner world that forms the content of the romantic, and must therefore find 
its representation as such inward feeling, and in the show or presentation of 
such feeling. The world of inwardness celebrates its triumph over the outer 
world, and actually in the sphere of the outer and in its medium manifests 
this its victory, owing to which the sensuous appearance sinks into worthless- 
ness. 

But, on the other hand, this type of Art, 5 like every other, needs an exter- 
nal vehicle of expression. Now the spiritual has withdrawn into itself out of 
the external and its immediate oneness therewith. For this reason, the sen- 
suous externality of concrete form is accepted and represented, as in Symbolic 
art, as something transient and fugitive. And the same measure is dealt to 
the subjective finite mind and will, even including the peculiarity or caprice 
of the individual, of character, action, etc., or of incident and plot. The 
aspect of external existence is committed to contingency, and left at the 
mercy of freaks of imagination, whose caprice is no more likely to mirror 
what is given as it is given, than to throw the shapes of the outer world into 
chance medley, or distort them into grotesqueness. For this external element 
no longer has its notion and significance, as in classical art, in its own sphere, 
and in its own medium. It has come to find them in the feelings, the dis- 
play of which is in themselves instead of being in the external and its form of 
reality, and which have the power to preserve or to regain their state of 
reconciliation with themselves, in every accident, in every unessential circum- 



1 " Inncrlichkeit? 'lit. "inwardness." 

2 Taken, considered as or determined to be negative. 

3 " Inward," again, does not mean merely inside our heads, but having the character of 
spirit in that its parts are not external to one another. A judgment is thus " inward." 

4 I.e. does not keep up a distinction between percipient and object, as between things in 
space. . Goodness, nobleness, etc., are not felt to be other than or outside the mind. 

5 The romantic. 



480 



APPENDIX I. 



stance that takes independent shape, in all misfortune and grief, and even in 
crime. 

Owing to this, the characteristics of symbolic art, in difference, discrepancy, 
and severance of Idea and plastic shape, are here reproduced, but with an 
essential difference. In the sphere of the romantic, the Idea, whose defec- 
tiveness in the case of the symbol produced the defect of external shape, has 
to reveal itself in the medium of spirit and feelings as perfected in itself. And 
it is because of this higher perfection that it withdraws itself from any ade- 
quate union with the external element, inasmuch as it can seek and achieve 
its true reality and revelation nowhere but in itself. 

This we may take as in the abstract the character of the symbolic, classical, 
and romantic forms of art, which represent the three relations of the Idea to 
its embodiment in the sphere of art. They consist in the aspiration after, 
and the attainment and transcendence of the Ideal as the true Idea of 
beauty. 

4. The third part of our subject, in contradistinction to the two just de- 
scribed, presupposes the conception of the Ideal, and the general types of 
art, inasmuch as it simply consists of their realization in particular sensuous 
media. Hence we have no longer to do with the inner development of artis- 
tic beauty in conformity with its general fundamental principles. What we 
have to study is how these principles pass into actual existence, how they 
distinguish themselves in their external aspect, and how they give actuality to 
every element contained in the idea of beauty, separately and by itself as a 
work of art, and not merely as a general type. Now, what art transfers into 
external existence are the differences 1 proper to the idea of beauty and im- 
manent therein. Therefore, the general types of art must reveal themselves 
in this third part, as before, in the character of the fundamental principle that 
determines the arrangement and definition of the several arts ; in other words, 
the species of art contain in themselves the same essential modifications as 
those with which we become acquainted as the general types of art. External 
objectivity, however, to which these forms are introduced through the medium 
of a sensuous and therefore particular material, affects these types in the way 
of making them separate into independent and so particular forms embodying 
their realization. For each type finds its definite character in some one de- 
finite external material, and its adequate actuality in the mode of portrayal 
which that prescribes. But, moreover, these types of art, being for all their 
determinateness, its universal forms, break the bounds of particular realiza-, 
tion by a determinate form of art, and achieve existence in other arts as well, 
although in subordinate fashion. Therefore, the particular arts belong each 
of them specifically to one of the general types of art, and constitute its ade- 
quate external actuality ; and also they represent, each of them after its own 
mode of external plasticity, the totality of the types of art. 2 

Then, speaking generally, we are dealing in this third principal division 
with the beautiful of art, as it unfolds itself in the several arts and in their 
creations into a world of actualized beauty. The content of this world is the 
beautiful, and the true beautiful, as we saw, is spiritual being in concrete 
shape, the Ideal ; or, more closely looked at, the absolute mind, and the 



1 I.e. species, modifications naturally arising out of a principle. 

2 Thus e.g. Sculpture is the art which corresponds par excellence to the general type called 
Classical Art ; but there is a Symbolic kind of sculpture, and 1 suppose a Romantic or 
modern kind of sculpture, although neither of these types are exactly fitted to the capabilities 
of Sculpture. 



APPENDIX I. 



truth itself. This region, that of divine truth artistically represented to per- 
ception and to feelings, forms the centre of the whole world of art. It is the 
independent, free, and divine plasticity, which has thoroughly mastered the 
external elements of form and of medium, and wears them simply as a means 
to manifestation of itself. Still, as the beautiful unfolds itself in this region 
in the character of objective reality, and in so doing distinguishes within itself 
its individual aspects and elements, permitting them independent particularity, 
it follows that this centre erects its extremes, realized in their peculiar actuality, 
into its own antitheses. Thus one of these extremes comes to consist in an 
objectivity as yet devoid of mind, in the merely natural vesture of God. At 
this point the external element takes plastic shape as something that has its 
spiritual aim and content, not in itself, but in another. 1 

The other extreme is the divine as inward, as something known, as the 
variously particularized subjective existence of the Deity ; it is the truth as 
operative and vital in sense, heart, and mind of individual subjects, not 
persisting in the mould of its external shapes, but as having returned into 
subjective, individual inwardness. In such a mode, the Divine is at the same 
time distinguished from its first manifestation as Deity, and passes thereby 
into the diversity of particulars which belongs to all subjective knowledge — 
emotion, perception, and feeling. In the analogous province of religion, with 
which art at its highest stage is immediately connected, we conceive this 
same difference as follows. Firsts we think of the earthly natural ■ life in its 
finiteness as standing on one side ; but, then, secondly, consciousness makes 
God its object, in which the distinction of objectivity and subjectivity is done 
away. And at last, thirdly, we advance from God as such to the devotion of 
the community, that is, to God as living and present in the subjective con- 
sciousness. Just so these three chief modifications present themselves in 
the world of art in independent development. 

(a) The jirst of the particular arts with which, according to their funda- 
mental principle, we have to begin, is architecture considered as a fine art. 2 
Its task lies in so manipulating external inorganic nature that it becomes 
cognate to mind, as an artistic outer world. The material of architecture is 
matter itself in its immediate externality as a heavy mass subject to mechanical 
laws, and its forms do not depart from the forms of inorganic nature, but are 
merely set in order in conformity with relations of the abstract understanding, 
i.e. with relations of symmetry. In this material and in such forms, the ideal 
as concrete spirituality does not admit of being realized. Hence the reality 
which is represented in them remains contrasted with the Idea, as something 
external which it has not penetrated, or has penetrated only to establish an 
abstract relation. For these reasons, the fundamental type of the fine art of 
building is the symbolical form of art. It is architecture that pioneers the 
way for the adequate realization of the God, and in this its service bestows 
hard toil upon existing nature, in order to disentangle it from the jungle of 
finitude and the abortiveness of chance. By this means it levels a space for 
the God, gives form to his external surroundings, and builds him his temple 
as a fit place for concentration of spirit, and for its direction to the mind's 
absolute objects. It raises an enclosure round the assembly of those gathered 
together, as a defence against the threatening of the storm, against rain, the 
hurricane, and wild beasts, and reveals the will to assemble, although ex- 



1 Architecture as relative to the purposes of life and of religion. 
a Die schone Architectur. 

1 I 



482 



APPENDIX I. 



ternally, yet in conformity with principles of art. With such import as this 
it has power to inspire its material and its forms more or less effectively, as 
the determinate character of the content on behalf of which it sets to work is 
more or less significant, more concrete or more abstract, more profound in 
sounding its own depths, or more dim and more superficial. So much, 
indeed, may architecture attempt in this respect as even to create an adequate 
artistic existence for such an import in its shapes and in its material. But in 
such a case it has already overstepped its own boundary, and is leaning to 
sculpture, the phase above it. For the limit of architecture lies precisely 
in this point, that it retains the spiritual as an inward existence over against 
the external forms of the art, and consequently must refer to what has soul 
only as to something other than its own creations. 

(J3) Architecture, however, as we have seen, has purified the external world, 
and endowed it with symmetrical order and with affinity to mind ; and the 
temple of the God, the house of his community, stands ready. Into this 
temple, then, in the second place, the God enters in the lightning-flash of indi- 
viduality, which strikes and permeates the inert mass, while the infinite 1 and 
no longer merely symmetrical form belonging to mind itself concentrates and 
gives shape to the corresponding bodily existence. This is the task of Sculp- 
ture. In as far as in this art the spiritual inward being which architecture 
can but indicate makes itself at home in the sensuous shape and its external 
matter, and in as far as these two sides are so adapted to one another that 
neither is predominant, sculpture must be assigned the classical for7?i of art 
as its fundamental type. For this reason the sensuous element itself has here 
no expression which could not be that of the spiritual element, just as, con- 
versely, sculpture can represent no spiritual content which does not admit 
throughout of being adequately presented to perception in bodily form. 
Sculpture should place the spirit before us in its bodily form and in im- 
mediate unity therewith at rest and in peace ; and the form should be animated 
by the content of spiritual individuality. And so the external sensuous matter 
is here no longer manipulated, either in conformity with its mechanical quality 
alone, as a mass possessing w r eight, nor in shapes belonging to the inorganic 
world, nor as indifferent to colour, etc. ; but it is wrought in ideal forms of 
the human figure, and, it must be remarked, in all three spatial dimensions. 

In this last respect we must claim for sculpture, that it is in it that the 
inward and spiritual are first revealed in their eternal repose and essential 
self-completeness. To such repose and unity with itself there can correspond 
only that external shape which itself maintains its unity and repose. And 
this is fulfilled by shape in its abstract spatiality. 2 The spirit which sculpture 
represents is that which is solid in itself, not broken up in the play of tri- 
vialities and of passions ; and hence its external form too is not abandoned 
to any manifold phases of appearance, but appears under this one aspect 
only, as the abstraction of space in the whole of its dimensions. 

(y) Now, after architecture has erected the temple, and the hand of sculp- 
ture has supplied it with the statue of the God, then, in the third place, this 
god present to sense is confronted in the spacious halls of his house by the 
community. The community is the spiritual reflection into itself of such 



1 In the sense " self-complete," "not primarily regarded as explained by anything out- 
side," like a machine or an animal contrasted with a wheel or a limb, which latter are 
finite, because they demand explanation and supplementation from without, i.e. necessarily 
draw attention to their own limit. 

2 I.e. shape taken simply as an object filling space. 



APPENDIX I. 



483 



sensuous existence, and is the animating subjectivity and inner life which 
brings about the result that the determining principle for the content of art, 
as well as for the medium which represents it in outward form, comes to be 
particularization [dispersion into various shapes, attributes, incidents, etc.], 
individualization, and the subjectivity which they require. 1 The solid unity 
which the God has in sculpture breaks up into the multitudinous inner lives 
of individuals, whose unity is not sensuous, but purely ideal. 2 

It is only in this stage that God Himself comes to be really and truly 
spirit — the spirit in His (God's) community ; for He here begins to be a 
to-and-fro, an alternation between His unity within Himself and His realization 
in the individual's knowledge and in its separate being, as also in the common 
nature and union of the multitude. In the community, God is released from 
the abstractness of unexpanded self-identity, as well as from the simple 
absorption in a bodily medium, by which sculpture represents Him. And 
He is thus exalted into spiritual existence and into knowledge, into the re- 
flected 3 appearance which essentially displays itself as inward and as subjec- 
tivity. Therefore the higher content is now the spiritual nature, and that 
in its absolute shape. But the dispersion of which Ave have spoken reveals 
this at the same time as particular spiritual being, and as individual character. 
Now, what manifests itself in this phase as the main thing is not the serene 
quiescence of the God in Himself, but appearance as such, being which is 
for another, self-manifestation. And hence, in. the phase we have reached, 
all the most manifold subjectivity in its living movement and operation — as 
human passion, action, and incident, and, in general, the wide realm of 
human feeling, will, and its negation, — is for its own sake the object of 
artistic representation. In conformity with this content, the sensuous element 
of art has at once to show itself as made particular in itself and as adapted 
to subjective inwardness. Media that fulfil this requirement we have in 
colour, in musical sound, and finally in sound as the mere indication of in- 
ward perceptions and ideas ; and as modes of realizing the import in question 
by help of these media we obtain painting, music, and poetry. In this region 
the sensuous medium displays itself as subdivided in its own being and 
universally set down as ideal. 4 Thus it has the highest degree of conformity 
with the content of art, which, as such, is spiritual, and the connection of 
intelligible import and sensuous medium develops into closer intimacy than 
was possible in the case of architecture and sculpture* The unity attained, 



1 The terms used in the text explain themselves if we compare, e.g. a Terriers with a 
Greek statue, or again, say, a Turner with the same. " Subjectivity " means that the work 
of art appeals to our ordinary feelings, experiences, etc. Music and poetry are still stronger 
cases than painting, according to the theory. Poetry especially can deal with everything. 

2 The unity of the individuals forming a church or nation is not visible, but exists in 
common sentiments, purposes, etc., and in the recognition of their community. 

3 An expression constantly applied to consciousness, because it can look at itself. Cf. : — 

" ' Tell me, good Brutus, can you see your face? ' 
' No, Cassius ; for the eye sees not itself 
But by reflection, by some other things.' " 

Julius Casar. 

4 Posited or laid down to be ideal ; almost = pronounced or made to be in the sense of 
not being; e.g. musical sound is " ideal " as existing, qua work of art, in memory only, the 
moment in which it is actually heard being fugitive ; a picture, in respect of the third 
dimension, which has to be read into it ; and poetry is almost wholly ideal, i.e. uses hardly 
any sensuous element, but appeals almost entirely to what exists in the mind. "Sub- 
divided," " besondert," like "particularisirt" above; because of the variety and diversity 
present in the mere material of colours, musical sounds, and ideas. 



4 8 4 



APPENDIX I. 



however, is a more inward unity, the weight of which is thrown wholly on the 
subjective side, and which, in as far as form and content are compelled to 
particularize themselves and give themselves merely ideal existence, can only 
come to pass at the expense of the objective universality of the content and 
also of its amalgamation with the immediately sensuous element. 1 

The arts, then, of which form and content exalt themselves to ideality, 
abandon the character of symbolic architecture and the classical ideal of 
sculpture, and therefore borrow their type from the romantic form of art, 
whose mode of plasticity they are most adequately adapted to express. And 
they constitute a totality of arts, because the romantic type is the most con- 
crete in itself. 2 

i. The articulation of this third sphere of the individual arts may be deter- 
mined as follows. The first art in it, which comes next to sculpture, is paint- 
ing. It employs as a medium for its content and for the plastic embodiment 
of that content visibility as such in as far as it is specialized in its own nature, 
i.e. as developed into colour. It is true that the material employed in archi- 
tecture and sculpture is also visible and coloured ; but it is not, as in paint- 
ing, visibility as such, not the single light which, differentiating itself in virtue 
of its contrast with darkness, and in combination with the latter, gives rise to 
colour. 3 This quality of visibility, made subjective in itself and treated as 
ideal, needs neither, like architecture, the abstractly mechanical attribute of 
mass as operative in the properties of heavy matter, nor, like sculpture, the 
complete sensuous attributes of space, even though concentrated into organic 
shapes. The visibility and the rendering visible which belong to painting 
have their differences in a more ideal form, in the several kinds of colour, and 
they liberate art from the sensuous completeness in space which attaches to 
material things, by restricting themselves to a plane surface. 

On the other hand, the content also attains the most comprehensive speci- 
fication. Whatever can find room in the human heart, as feeling, idea, and 
purpose ; whatever it is capable of shaping into act — all this diversity of 
material is capable of entering into the varied content of painting. The 
whole realm of particular existence, from the highest embodiment of mind 
down to the most isolated object of nature, finds a place here. For it is pos- 
sible even for finite nature, 4 in its particular scenes and phenomena, to make 
its appearance in the realm of art, if only some allusion to an element of mind 
endows it with affinity to thought and feeling. 

ii. The second art in which the romantic type realizes itself is contrasted 
with painting, and is music. Its medium, though still sensuous, yet develops 
into still more thorough subjectivity and particularization. Music, too, treats 
the sensuous as ideal, and does so by negating, 5 and idealizing into the indi- 



1 Again, the subject of a Turner or Teniers is not objectively universal, in the simplest 
sense ; not something that is actually and literally the same everywhere and for every one. 
And both painting and music (immediately sensuous elements) are less completely amalga- 
mated with the ideal, represent it more solidly and thoroughly than the statue, so far as the 
ideal is itself external or plastic. 

2 The greater affinity of romantic art with the movement and variety of the modern 
spirit displays itself not only in the greater flexibility of painting, music, or poetry, as com- 
pared with architecture and sculpture, but in the fact that the Romantic type contains these 
three arts at least, while the Symbolic and Classical types had only one art each. 

3 This is drawn from Goethe's doctrine of colour, which Hegel unfortunately adopted in 
opposition to Newton's theory. 

4 He means landscape, principally. 

5 " Aufheben" used pregnantly by Hegel to mean both "cancel," "annul," and, "pre- 



APPENDIX I. 



485 



vidual isolation of a single point, the indifferent externality 1 of space, whose 
complete semblance is accepted and imitated by painting. The single point, 
qua such a negativity (excluding space) is in itself a concrete and active 
process of negation 2 within the attributes of matter, in the shape of a motion 
and tremor of the material body within itself and in its relation to itself. 
Such an inchoate ideality of matter, 3 which appears no longer as under the 
form of space, but as temporal ideality, 4 is sound, the sensuous set down as 
negated, with its abstract visibility converted into audibility, inasmuch as 
sound, so to speak, liberates the ideal content from its immersion in matter. 
This earliest inwardness of matter and inspiration of soul into it furnishes the 
medium for the mental inwardness — itself as yet indefinite, — and for the soul 5 
into which mind concentrates itself; and finds utterance in its tones for the 
heart with its whole gamut of feelings and passions. Thus music forms the 
centre of the romantic arts, just as sculpture represents the central point 
between architecture and the arts of romantic subjectivity. Thus, too, it 
forms the point of transition between abstract spatial sensuousness, such as 
painting employs, and the abstract spirituality of poetry. Music has within 
itself, like architecture, a relation of quality conformable to the understanding, 
as the antithesis to emotion and inwardness ; and has also as its basis a 
solid conformity to law on the part of the tones, of their conjunction, and of 
their succession. 

iii. As regards the third and most spiritual mode of representation of the 
romantic art-type, we must look for it in poetry. Its characteristic peculiarity 
lies in the power with which it subjects to the mind and to its ideas the sen- 
suous element from which music and painting in their degree began to liber- 
ate art. For sound, the only external matter which poetry retains, is in it no 
longer the feeling of the sonorous itself, but it is a sign, which by itself is 
void of import. And it is a sign of the idea which has become concrete in 
itself, and not merely of indefinite feeling and of its nuances and grades. This 
is how sound develops into the Word, as voice articulates in itself, whose im- 
port it is to indicate ideas and notions. The merely negative point up to 
which music had developed now makes its appearance as the completely con- 
crete point, the point which is mind, the self-conscious individual, which, pro- 
ducing out of itself the infinite space of its ideas, unites it with the temporal 
character of sound. Yet this sensuous element, which in music was still im- 
mediately one with inward feeling, is in poetry separated from the content of 
consciousness. In poetry the mind determines this content for its own sake, 
and apart from all else, into the shape of ideas, and though it employs sound 



serve," " fix in mind," " idealize." The use of this word is a cardinal point of his dialectic. 
See Wiss. der Logik, i. 104. I know of no equivalent but " put by," provincial Scotch 
" put past." The negation of space is an attribute of music. The parts of a chord are no 
more in space than are the parts of a judgment. Hegel expresses this by saying that music 
idealizes space and concentrates it into a point. 

1 The parts of space, though external to each other, are not distinguished by qualitative 
peculiarities. 

2 " Anfheben" 

3 " Ideality of matter: " the distinctively material attribute of a sonorous body, its exten- 
sion, only appears in its sound indirectly, or inferentially, by modifying the nature of the 
sound. It is, therefore, "idealized." 

4 Succession in time is a degree more " ideal " than co-existence in space, because it 
exists solely in the medium of memory. 

5 " Seele : " mind on its individual side, as a particular feeling subject. " Geist " is rather 
mind as the common nature of intelligence. Thus in feeling and self-feeling, mind is said to 
concentrate itself into a soul. 



486 



APPENDIX I. 



to express them, yet treats its solely as a symbol without value or import. 
Thus considered, sound may just as well be reduced to a mere letter, for the 
audible, like the visible, is thus depressed into a mere indication of mind. 1 
For this reason the proper medium of poetical representation is the poetical 
imagination and intellectual portrayal itself. And as this element is common 
to all types of art, it follows that poetry runs through them all and develops 
itself independently in each. Poetry is the universal art of the mind which 
has become free in its own nature, and which is not tied to find its realization 
in external sensuous matter, but expatiates exclusively in the inner space and 
inner time of the ideas and feelings. Yet just in this its highest phase art 
ends by transcending itself, inasmuch as it abandons the medium of a har- 
monious embodiment of mind in sensuous form, and passes from the poetry 
of imagination into the prose of thought. 

5. Such we may take to be the articulated totality of the particular arts, viz. the 
external art of architecture, the objective art of sculpture, and the subjective 
art of painting music and poetry. Many other classifications have been 
attempted, for a work of art presents so many aspects, that, as has often been 
the case, first one and then another is made the basis of classification. For 
instance, one might take the sensuous medium. Thus architecture is treated 
as crystallization ; sculpture, as the organic modelling of the material in its 
sensuous and spatial totality ; painting, as the coloured surface and line ; 
while in music, space, as such, passes into the point of time possessed of con- 
tent within itself, until finally the external medium is in poetry depressed into 
complete insignificance. Or, again, these differences have been considered 
with reference to their purely abstract attributes of space and time. Such 
abstract peculiarities of works of art may, like their material medium, be con- 
sistently explored in their characteristic traits; but they cannot be worked out 
as the ultimate and fundamental law, because any such aspect itself derives 
its origin from a higher principle, and must therefore be subordinate thereto. 

This higher principle we have found in the types of art — symbolic, classical 
and romantic — which are the universal stages or elements 2 of the Idea of 
beauty itself. For symbolic art attains its most adequate reality and most 
complete application in architecture, in which it holds sway in the full import 
of its notion, and is not yet degraded to be, as it were, the inorganic nature 
dealt with by another art. The classical type of art, on the other hand, finds 
adequate realization in sculpture, while it treats architecture only as furnishing 
an enclosure in which it is to operate, and has not acquired the power of develop- 
ing painting and music as absolute 3 forms for its content. The romantic type 
of art, finally takes possession of painting and music, and in like manner of poetic 



1 Hegel seems to accept this view. Was he insensible to sound in poetry ? Some very 
grotesque verses of his, preserved in his biography, go to show that his ear was not sensitive. 
Yet his critical estimate of poetry is usually just. Shakespeare and Sophocles were prob- 
ably his favourites. And, as a matter of proportion, what he here says is true. It must be 
remembered that the beauty of sound in poetry is to a great extent indirect, being supplied 
by the passion or emotion which the ideas symbolized by the sounds arouse. The beauty of 
poetical sound in itself is very likely less than often supposed. It must have the capacity for 
receiving passionate expression ; but that is not the same as the sensuous beauty of a note or 
colour. If the words used in a noble poem were divested of all meaning, they would lose 
much, though not all, of the beauty of their sound. 

2 " Stages or elements." " Momente" Hegel's technical phrase for the stages which form 
the essential parts or factors of any idea. They make their appearance successively, but the 
earlier are implied and retained in the latter. 

3 Adequate, and so of permanent value. 



APPENDIX I. 



487 



representation, as substantive and unconditionally adequate modes of utter- 
ance. Poetry, however, is conformable to all types of the beautiful, and ex- 
tends over them all, because the artistic imagination is its proper medium, and 
imagination is essential to every product that belongs to the beautiful, what- 
ever its type may be. 

And, therefore, what the particular arts realize in individual works of art, 
are according to their abstract conception simply the universal types which 
constitute the self-unfolding Idea of beauty. It is as the external realization 
of this Idea that the wide Pantheon of art is being erected, whose architect and 
builder is the spirit of beauty as it awakens to self-knowledge, and to complete 
which the history of the world will need its evolution of ages. 



APPENDIX II. 



The following notes on specific examples of musical expression have been 
furnished me by Mr. J. D. Rogers, as mentioned in the preface. They 
appear admirably to illustrate the conception of music, as the spirit of actions 
and events, suggested by Plato and Aristotle, and in modern times popularised 
by Schopenhauer. 

1. Schumann's In der Nacht used to summon up before my imagination 
the picture of the moon struggling through the clouds on a windy night — 
emerging and disappearing by turns ; then for a while reigning " apparent 
queen " amid white fleecy clouds, which are not sufficient to intercept its 
light. During two moments even this silken veil is withdrawn, only to be 
succeeded by a bank of black clouds, for a long time impenetrable, at last 
penetrated at intervals a little more irregular and with a brightness a little 
wilder and more meteoric than before ; finally — the light is put out and 
quenched by the storm. 

I learnt some years afterwards that Schumann also associated this piece 
with a picture, the idea of which occurred to him after he had written the 
entire set of Fantasiestikke to which it belongs. It was a picture portraying 
the story of Hero and Leander ; his picture is not incompatible with mine. 
In his the clouds correspond to the waves, the moon to a swimmer, buried 
and stifled in their troughs or flashing and^ calling out from their crests. 
Where the moon triumphs in my story, in his there is a love scene on the 
shore, accompanied by the distant rippling of the waves ; it seems almost as 
though 

" The billows of cloud that around thee roll 
Shall sleep in the light of a wondrous day." 

But, no ; there comes the plunge back into waves blacker than before — 
tossings to and fro — cries from the swimmer and from the shore — and, finally, 
" night wraps up everything." 1 The music can be rendered after the manner 
of Max Miiller either into a Lunar myth, or into a Greek legend. What the 
moon does, and what the Greek hero did in the story, are to a great extent 
the same ; and music interprets that important element or attribute which is 
common to both. 

2. If music seizes hold of the spirit or soul of any event or series of events, 
has — it may be asked — any composer attempted to represent God? God in the 
sense in which the word is used in the common phrase, " God in history," or 
in which God is described in Tennyson's Higher Pa?itheism> or Wordsworth's 
Tin/e?-?i Abbey. I reply by an instance. Brahms' German requiem has often 
been praised for the rich elaboration of its detail, its blending of the antique 



1 Schumann's Jugendbriefe, 21 April, 1838. "Von Kragen habe ich eben einen Brief 
— er schreibt mir viel Schones iiber die Phantasiestucke und scbwarmt ordentlich nach seiner 
Art darin — 'die Nacht' ware 'gross u. schon ' schrieb er, u. sein liebstes, mir beinah' auch. 
Spater, als ich fertig war, habe ich zu meiner Freude die Geschichte von Hero und Leander 
darin gefunden. Du kennst sie wohl. Leander schwimmt alle Nachte durch das Meer zu 
seiner Geliebte die auf dem Leuchtthurm wartet, mit brennender Fackel ihm den Weg 
zeigt. Es ist eine schone, romantische Sage. Spiel' ich 'die Nacht,' so kann ich das Bild 
nicht vergessen — erst, wie er sich ins Meer stiirzt — sie raft— er antwortet — er durch die Wel- 
len glucklich an's Land — dann die Cantilena, wo sie sich in den Armen haben — dann wie er 
wieder fort muss, sich nicht trennen kann — bis die Nacht wieder alles in Dunkel einhullt. 
.Sage mir doch ob auch dir dies Bild zur Musik passt." 

483 



APPENDIX II. 



489 



and modern, its contrapuntal devices fused in the crucible of romanticism. 
But it has yet finer and deeper merits. The solemn opening, " Blessed are 
they that mourn," is set to the same music as the solemn close, " Blessed are 
the dead." In the middle of the piece the name of God is introduced for the 
first, and almost the last time, 1 to the words, " The souls of the righteous are 
in God's hand." That name is translated into music by the pedal note, which 
is held down from beginning to end of the fugue to which these words are 
set. The pedal note persists, makes its presence felt throughout • is all- 
enduring, all-pervading ; the fugue starts from it, and finally, after many in- 
tricate wanderings, returns to it ; it is the fundamental note — the foundation 
of the first and last chords, and, although many different, and apparently in- 
compatible, harmonies are found in the course of the fugue, these harmonies 
are all finally resolved into the initial harmony, of which that pedal note is at 
once the characteristic note and the epitome. Everything proceeds from it 
and returns to it ; it alone is permanent, and steadily, continuously, irresist- 
ibly self-asserting. Neither poetry nor painting nor architecture can express 
mysteries such as these with such searching force and directness. 

3. Mozart's Requiem,- like Brahms', ends with the same music as it began 
with, and in both instances the words to which the music is set are quite dif- 
ferent in the first and last number. The first number of Mozart's work repre- 
sents death ; the last number represents immortality. The same agitation, 
the same solemnity, and, we must add, the same uncertainty clothes both 
ideas. There is a wonderful touch in Mozart's closing number, which seems 
to have escaped most writers. It can scarcely be understood without a pass- 
ing reference to what precedes it. Compared with most of Mozart's works, 
this work stands alone for its restlessness — its quick changes from mood to 
mood. " Confutatis Maledictis " begins with cursing — then a prayer for 
blessing intervenes — finally, it ends in a sigh of despair. "Lachrymosa" 
begins sentimentally, then comes the stern march of inevitable fate, and 
suddenly there is a glimpse of almost voluptuous pleasure. In each of these 
two cases the three moods are not blended ; they succeed one another, and 
with a rapidity which is amazing in a writer who is usually diffuse and does 
not delight in contrasts. The optimistic vein is separated and viewed apart ; 
it is unmistakable, and its prevailing characteristic is, that it is always in the 
major, not in the minor mode, and is usually a cadence. But there is another 
means of identifying the major mode with a happy ending, and the minor 
mode with an unhappy ending — as those modes are used in this particular 
work. The " Sanctus " is a transposition of the " Dies Irae " from minor into 
major. Wrath is the minor of beatification in Mozart's Requiem. It is, 
therefore with intense, almost painful, interest that we look forward to the 
last cadence of all. Will it be minor or major? Most of Mozart's devices 
in this work are referable to older writers — Handel, Haydn, and every com- 
poser is represented by turns. His last cadence of all is one which we search 
for in vain in the immediately preceding centuries, although in the middle 
ages it was the most usual conclusion of all. There is no " third " in the last 
chord. Mozart's last chord is neither major nor minor ; it might be either ; 



1 It comes in the next number, whose main themes are echoed from the number which we 
are discussing. 

2 Some parts of the Requiem are (it is believed) not by Mozart ; this aesthetic criticism 
is based on the assumption that the main parts were written and the idea of the whole con- 
ceived by one author. 



490 



APPENDIX II. 



it deliberately shirks answering the momentous question by quietly omitting 
its most important constituent part. He dare not answer the terrible ques- 
tion, which he seems to have carefully provided himself in the preceding 
sections of the work with definite musical means for answering. The work is 
anxious, fitful, and moody throughout ; as was once said of it, " it seems to 
blush " ; it is pale and rosy by turns ; it ends with a final culminating un- 
certainty. 

4. There is no better instance than that afforded by Wagner's Meister- 
singer, of music entering as an element of living interest into an idea or a 
story. Here are a few typical instances of music supplying the sense which 
the text or the situation only hint at in a far-off inconclusive way, or else leave 
absolutely unexplained. 

(a) In the first place, it adds to our knowledge of Hans Sachs' character. 
At the beginning of the Second — as at the beginning of the Third Act — Hans 
Sachs is seen musing. The subject of his meditation is Walter's Spring song, 
" So new and yet so old." It was a love song, couched in the spirit — as Hans 
Sachs says, in Act hi. — which leads to elopement, not to marriage ; 1 it was 
fiery, impetuous, and reckless. The stormiest phrase in the song, "Es 
schwillt und schwallt," is the very phrase which made most impression upon 
the other Meistersinger, and also upon Hans Sachs. But the former, when 
they quote it — or rather when the orchestra tells us it is running in their 
heads — exaggerate its restlessness, and the pedal " G," which they interpolate, 
makes it undignified and unharmonious. 2 Hans Sachs' memory purifies and 
refines it; to him it presents itself as gentle, melancholy, and subdued (p. 170). 3 
The harmonies are richer, the rhythm graver, the love portrayed is of that 
sort which is longsuffering and kind ; still it is the same love, the same 
melody, in spite of its transformation. So, too, with the other snatches from 
Walter's melodies ; they are all quoted accurately, but are toned down and 
ennobled in the quotation. Nothing brings home to one more forcibly than 
this, the distinction, the maturity, and the quiet grasp of Hans Sachs' artistic 
genius. The highest critical gift is that which enables its possessor to select 
wisely, and to exalt what it selects. And we hear that Hans Sachs possesses 
this gift in a perfect form. 

((3) Again there is one point in which the music, while developing Hans 
Sachs' character, contains the secret upon which a leading incident in the 
play turns. Look at the music appropriated to Hans Sachs in his interview 
with Eva in the second act. It is obviously built upon a ground-bass taken 
from the four rising semi-tones, which play so large a part in Walter's first 
song, "Am stillen Herd." If the music is to be trusted, Walter's invisible 
(but audible) presence casts its shadow across the relations between Hans 
Sachs and Eva. But there is no suggestion of this explanation in the text. 
Let us follow the musical hint a little further. This series of semi-tones con- 
stitutes a nucleus which branches out into many different directions ; for 
instance, it is often accompanied by a " counter-subject," or presented in a 
rhythmical cadence — the spirit of which is happily caught by David (p. 39), 
when he sets it to the words, " Sorg' und Acht." Hans Sachs is presented to 



1 " Mit solchem Dicht und Liebesfeuer 

Verfiihrt man wohl Tochter zum Abenteuer : 
Doch fur liebseligen Ehestand 
Man andre Wort' und Weisen fand. " 



2 Seep. 123 of the piano score. 

3 Of the piano score. 



APPENDIX II. 



49 I 



us as the true workman — one who learns by taking trouble. Or it is linked 
with the kindly, easy-going phrase (see pp. 124, 314), in which Hans Sachs 
conveys his friendship to Walter (comp. p. 409). Or else the counter-subject 
contains in embryo those notes — a falling 6th and rising 5th, both minor — 
which afterwards impart such grave sadness and resigned conviction to the 
monologue of " Wahn ! Wahn ! " in which Hans Sachs assumes the prophetic 
mantle, and answers the pessimistic question — " Why do the people imagine 
a vain thing ? " by the optimistic reply — " Nothing happens without it." The 
spirit of the monologue is not querulous, or rhetorical, or noisily impotent, 
like that of false prophets ■ but more like that of the Miltonic Manoa : 

" Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail 
Or knock the breast ; no weakness, no contempt, 
Dispraise, or blame ; nothing but well and fair " ; 

The content of the monologue is — if we may quote Goethe with a change 
— " Illusion ceases to be an evil because it is universal." But here the music 
only reveals Hans Sachs' manner and attitude towards speculative prob- 
lems ; towards Art and Work, or in his ordinary intercourse with friends ; it 
throws no light on the problem, why should a recollection of Walter haunt 
Hans Sachs when he is with Eva ? A fourth counter-subject of semi-tones 
creeping in an opposite direction sometimes attends the primal phrase ; and 
it is here that the secret is told. A tiny gradual transformation in this phrase 
makes it pass into the theme which pervades Tristan and Isolde, 1 while Hans 
Sachs is saying to Eva, " If I did win your hand, you and Walter would make 
a King Mark of me." The words came suddenly, almost abruptly ; but the 
music has from the first foreshadowed and unfolded this explanation. The 
music and the music alone has seized and interpreted what is the key of the 
whole situation. 

(7) There is a phrase consisting of a sequence of descending 4ths and 
ascending 3rds, which at one time or another applies to every personage of 
the play, or even forms a part of what they sing. There is a glimpse of it 
when Eva says to Magdalene, " Mir ist als war' ich gar wie im Traum " (20). 
Hans Sachs, who has a happy knack of wedding voice to verse, sings to it the 
words, " Mein Freund in holder Jugendzeit " (310). It is the prelude to 
Walter's song, "Am stillen Herd," in which he describes himself as having 
a vision of spring in winter time. The very Lehrbuben (p. 32) reproduced 
it in the first hurrying staccato notes of the 2nd scene. It is faintly echoed 
in Walter's allusion to " Singkunst " (p. 40) ; and a sequence of descending 
4ths dominates the love scene of Hans Sachs and Eva in the 2nd Act (cf. 
p. 352). It is the common bond which connects the Preislied, Beckmesser's 
Serenade, and the gay Motive which recurs wherever the Masters allude to 
the preparations for celebrating the Johannis Fest. The intimate alliance be- 
tween these two last motives is vividly illustrated by Hans Sachs, who in 
" Wahn ! Wahn ! " shows the Johannis Fest Motive insensibly melting into the 
twitterings and chirrupings of Beckmesser ; and if only those who play 
Beckmesser's part acted with as much intelligence as fun, the audience would 
easily perceive the near kinship of his with Walter's prize song. Put all these 
attributes together and the phrase may be fairly named " the Spirit of the 
time and place " — the Zeitgeist and Genius loci in one — which breathes on 
all alike, just and unjust, but which only the worthiest partake worthily ; 



1 2 series of four rising semi-tones, accompanied by a counter-subject, first of two then of 
three descending semi-tones. 



492 



APPENDIX II. 



which was young and (like Watts' picture of the Zeitgeist), looking straight 
forward ; which loved graceful forms, and worshipped Art ; which anticipated 
the birth of spring; and was, so to speak, the dream of young Germany, for 
it dreamt of "what the world would be when the years have died away." 

(S) Again here is a matter in which Wagner's music takes us into the very 
heart of mediaeval history. People do not sufficiently realise the way in which 
Wagner's Meistersinger music drives home into the hearer, not only the intimate 
association but the absolute identification of Art, Industry, and Religion, 1 which 
the mediaeval guilds effected. Take the first four bars of the overture ; they 
are bars so stately and pompous, that even when the Lehrbuben reproduce 
them on the occasion of the Johannis Fest (p. 416, 417) in quick bustling 
time, the hearer feels that they have added a cubit to their moral stature 
since the time when they regarded the Johannis Fest as a kind of jolly, 
rollicking Bank holiday (Act ii., init). They are first used in the play to 
denote "the tribunal which awards the prize to the Meistersinger" (p. 22), 
and the impartiality which should characterise that tribunal (p. 127). On 
pp. 74 and 75 Pogner emphasises the high worth of Art, and the honour which 
Germany does to Art — and on p. 108 Kothner expounds the principles on 
which the Meisterlied must be constructed — to this phrase. The words to 
which it is set convey a high ideal of artistic appreciation ; an ideal which 
the guild of Meistersinger always aspired to and in the last scene of the play 
attained. The heraldic trapping and all the pomp and pageantry (pp. 24-294) ; 
the formalities and procedure {e.g. p. 421), the external lip- worship (see 
p. 408) of the guild are represented by a different phrase ; the phrase which 
we are discussing is appropriated to the spiritual objects and deeper meanings 
of its existence. And — says the music — these objects and deeper meanings 
are to the guild as a religion. They had a religious origin, and they are still 
religious in their character. For these four bars — omitting the second only 
— are the subject of the chorale with which the play opens ; and Hans Sachs 
baptizes the mastersong of Walter to the same theme. It is this union of Art 
and Religion in the guild — emphasised as it is by their employing the same 
themes — which makes the laying of the scene of the first Act in the ante-chapel 
of the Katharinen-kirche natural and appropriate. Peace flowed from this 
union. The heavy scales going in these bars in opposite directions occur several 
times in the play, once (p. 72) to typify the people of Niirnberg, once (p. 189) 
to the words " lasst uns in Ruh' verschnaufen," once to " Liebes Niirnberg 
so friedsam " (p. 299). Niirnberg attained rest and peace in the trades-unions 
whose members pursued art with religious fervour. Carlyle, after visiting Dr. 
Arnold at Rugby, described what he saw as " the rarest sight in the world," " a 
temple of industrious peace." So to the Niirnbergers their industrial guild of 
the Meistersinger was just this ; a temple of peace : and the music does more 
than merely describe it as such ; it impresses upon us, and illustrates and 
justifies for us this description. It takes and treats this description as the 
kernel and centre of the whole drama of Niirnberger life. 

(e) Of course Wagner uses his " Leit Motif," or " Independent Episodes," 
or "Phrases," in very different ways, in different plays. The peculiar cha- 
racteristic of the Meistersinger is that in it the phrases are used to add or 
develop ideas. Just as the action starts a new train of ideas in the intermezzo 



1 "The notes of English feeling are few, but they are deep ; Industry, Art, Religion, 
so runs the solemn scale " Disraeli. In Wagner they are not a scale, but a chord ; they do 
not follow, but unite with one another. 



APPENDIX II. 



493 



of the Probelied, 1 and, in the song, " Eva aus dem Paradies," — so the music 
lends a new sense to the character of the chief persons in the play, and the 
moral and intellectual atmosphere which they breathe. In the Gotterdam- 
merung, for instance, the main use to which the music is put is to suggest 
absent images, to denote objects, or imitate a picturesque effect. It is 
brilliantly done ; for instance, the glow of the magic fire which surrounds 
Briinnhilde has a sudden periodic expansion and crescendo at the end of 
every bar, as though some one were blowing on the furnace ; again, the 
Rhine daughters swim and laugh (unmassig) to the same consecutive fifths 
so orchestrated as to be a musical illustration of the metaphor " Floods of 
laughter ; " again, the hero is dubbed Knight in one phrase, Hunter in another, 
Gold-seeker in another, and so on — Wagner christens his attributes, not his 
mere body, by some musical phrase ; again, there is singular appropriateness 
in the galloping horses (compare Berlioz' Damnation de Faust), and the 
horn behind the stage (compare Beethoven's Leonora), and the creeping 
worm (compare Haydn's Creation) ; but we feel that all this is what is more 
properly called programme music ; music is specialised to the suggestion of 
certain images and objects, just like the language of everyday life ; and how- 
ever brilliant the enhanced effect is which it produces in the opera, we feel 
that it could be dispensed with. Language already does that duty well 
enough ; why bring in music to improve upon what is good, to illustrate what 
is clear? Either music has a distinct duty to do, or it has no business there. 
This criticism only applies to the employment of "Leitmotif" in the Nibel- 
ungen Lied. It does not apply to the barbaric rhythms, the rude force, the 
abrupt changes, and the gorgeous harmonies which seem to me to take 
the hearer right back into the heart of the early Icelandic world. 

(£) Nor must we for one moment think that Wagner even in the Meister- 
singer is a perfect artist. Here are two instances of mortal frailty. On p. 
189 Hans Sachs sarcastically alluded to Walter's " Hochmuth " in a phrase 
usually appropriated to the officious Beckmesser (e.g. p. 125). Wagner can 
hardly mean to insinuate that some portion of Beckmesser's spirit is passing 
over into Hans Sachs. Again, the sequence of descending 4ths and ascend- 
ing 3rds alluded to in the above is an exact description of the horn-motive 
in the Nibelungen Lied. It might seem hypercritical to criticise the phrases 
of one play by the light of the phrases of another play ; but Wagner has 
challenged this criticism by his allusion to Tristan and Isolde. And, of 
course, the orchestration is different ; but would a great musician attach so 
much importance to a detail of orchestration ? Brahms, like Beethoven and 
Schubert, loves to sound out a phrase on every instrument of his orchestra 
in succession, 2 and we feel that this is the real musical tradition handed down 



" In einer Dornen-hecken Von diirrem Laub umrauscht, 

Von Neid und Gram verzehrt, Er lauert und lauscht 

Musst' er sich da verstecken Wie er das frohe Singen 

Der Winter Grimm-bewehrt, Zu Schaden konnte bringen." 

'..g. From the treble piano to the bass drum in the pianoforte concerto in D minor. 



494 



APPENDIX II. 



to us by the great masters, and conformed to by Wagner when at his best — 
that the identity of the phrase must be admitted, on whatever instrument or 
instruments it is played. And Wagner was at his best not in the Nibelungen 
Lied, but in the Meistersinger ; and even in the Meistersi?iger he was not a 
perfect artist. Perhaps it is that music cannot quite do what he wanted it 
to do. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY. 



A fairly complete Bibliography of the subject is given in A Guide to the 
Literature of ^Esthetics, by C. M. Gayley and F. N. Scott, Berkeley. U.S.A., 
1 89 1. Prof. Knight's Philosophy of the Beautiful also refers to an immense 
number of works, especially in recent English and American literature. 
The undermentioned books, except where the contrary is stated, are such 
as I have actually employed in preparing the present work, and are without 
exception such as have some genuine interest for the student, who can, I 
hope, ascertain from the body of my treatise for what purpose each of them 
is serviceable. 

1. Historical and auxiliary to history. 

a. Complete Histories of ^Esthetic theory both ancient and modern: — 
Schasler's Kritische Geschichte der Aesthetik, 1872. 2 vols. 12 18 pp. (con- 
tinuously paged). 

Zimmermann : Aesthetik, erster, historisch-kritischer T/ieil, 1858. 1 vol. 
800 pp. 

Cf. also Erdmann's History of Philosophy. 3 vols. (E. Tr., 1890). 
Carriere : Die Kunst im Zusammenhang der Culiurentivickelung u. die 
Ideate der Menschheit. 5 vols. YVerke 4-9, 1S86. 
Sully's article "^Esthetic," in Encycl. Britannica. 
Knight's Philosophy of the Beaidiful. Part I. History, 1889. 

b. Partial histories of aesthetic or art-consciousness, and auxiliary works : — 

i. Ancient. 

Eduard Muller's Geschichte der Theorie d. Kunst bei den Alien. 2 vols. 
1834. 

[A most thorough and valuable work, on which Schasler's is largely 
'founded]. 

Winckelmann's Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums. Werke, 3-6. First 
published about 1765. 

Hirt : Geschichte der bilde?iden Kiinste bei den Alien. 1833. 

Ritter and Preller's History of Philosophy in extracts from the original 
sources. 

Overbeck's Die Antiken Sclirift-quellen zur Geschichte d. bildeiiden Kiinste 
bei de?i Griec1ie?i. 1868. 

Overbeck's Geschichte d. griechischen Plastik. 2 vols. 

A. S. Murray's History of Greek Sculpture. 2 vols. 

Miss J. E. Harrison's Mythology and Monuments of A?icient Athens. 

R. L. Nettleship : Essay on the Theory of Education in the Republic, of 
Plato, in Abbott's Hellenica. 1SS0. 

Prof. H. Nettleship on " Latin Criticism," Journal of Philology, xviii. 

Mackail's Greek Anthology, with Introduction. 1890. 

Prof. W. Wallace's Epicureanism. 

Prof. S. H. Butcher's Some Aspects of the Greek Genius. 1891. 
Bernays : Zwei Abhandlungen iiber die Aristotelische Theorie des Drama. 
I&57. 

Article "Archaeology," by A. S. Murray, in Encyclopaedia Britannica, with 
many other articles treating of ancient writers and schools of philosophy. 

495 



496 



BIBLIOGRAPHY. 



It is to be borne in mind that no English student ought to be content with 
a mere literary knowledge of the ancient art-consciousness, which he has un- 
rivalled opportunities of studying in its products in the British Museum. 



Lotze's Geschichte der Aesthetik in Deutschland. 1868, pp. 672 [beginning 
with Baumgarten]. 

Hartmann : Aesthetik. Erster historisch-kritischer Theil. 1886, pp. 580 
[Kant to Schasler]. 

Lessing's Leben u. Werke, Danzel u. Guhrauer, with additions by Maltzahn 
and Norberger. 2 vols. 1200 pp. in all. 1880. [A very full account of the 
literary conditions of the German 18th century]. 

Mark Pattison's Essays, on Wolf and Scaliger. 

Pater's Marius the Epicui'ean, and Studies in the History of the Renaissance. 
Scherer's History of German Literature. [E.Tr.]. 
Articles in the Encyclopedia Britannica : — 

Scholasticism, Prof. A. Seth. 

Image-worship, Rev. J. S. Black. 

Neo-Platonism, Prof. Harnack. 

The Catacombs, Rev. Canon Venables. 



Wood-carving, ) 
Mural Decoration, Prof Middleton and Mr. Wm. Morris. 
And many articles on particular philosophers and schoolmen. 

2. Systematic works, i.e., direct contributions, partial or complete, to the 
theory of beauty. 

The ancient and mediaeval writers, referred to in the text, need not be 
enumerated. Many important extracts from the less accessible works will be 
found in Ritter and Preller, and in Overbeck's Schriftquellen ; in the latter 
especially under the head of Pheidias, e.g. the famous passage of Philostra- 
tus on imagination (No. 801): also Lucian's account of the Calumnia of 
Apelles (No. 1874). 

Longinus : Havell's translation with introduction by A. Lang. 1890. 

Corneille's Works: vol. i., containing the life by Fontenelle; vol. x., con- 
taining the three " discourses " on the drama ; Voltaire's notes throughout. 

Lessing : Laocoon, Hamburgische Dramaturgie, and Wie die Alien den Tod 
gebildet (see too the plays Miss Sara Sampson, Minna v. Barnhehn, and 
Emilia Galotti). 

Shaftesbury: " Characteristics,'" 5th ed. 1732. 

Burke's Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. 
Works, vol. i. 1761. 

Kaimes' (Home's) Elements of Criticism. 9th ed. 181 7. 
Hogarth's A?ialysis of Beauty [I have not seen]. 1753. 
Reynolds in Idler, Nos. 76, 79, 82. 1758-9. 

Schiller: Werke 11 and 12, containing Brief e ilber die Aesthetische Erzie- 
hung d. Menschheit (also published separately in a small pamphlet), Anmuth 
u. Wiirde, Ueber naive u. sentimentale Dichtung, Revieiu of Matheson's poems. 

Schiller and Goethe : Briefwechsel. 

Goethe: Deutsche Baukunst. 1773. W. 25. 



ii. Modern, 



Mosaic, 

Schools of Painting, 
Sculpture, 




Middleton. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY. 



497 



Der Sammler u. die Seinigen. 1797. W. 24. 

Winckehnann u. sein Jahrhnndert. 1805. W. 24. 
Einwirkung der neueren Philosophie. Undated. W. 30. 

Wahrheit u. Dichtung. 181 1 ff. W. 17. 

Friedrich von Schlegel : Essays on the Study of Greek Poetry. Werke 5 . 1797. 
On the Language and Wisdom of the Ancient Hindus. 18 13 [I have not 
seen this]. 

Kant : Werke (Rosenkranz' edition). Vol. iv. containing 

Beobachtungen iiber das Gefiihl des Schdnen u. des Erhabenen, 1 7 64 : and 
Kritik der Urtheilskraft. 1790. 

Schelling : System des transcende?italen Idealismus. W. 3. 

Philosophie der Kunst. W. 5. 

Ueber Dante in philosophischer Beziehung, ib. 

Ueber das Verhdltniss der bildenden Kiinste zu der Natur. W. 7. 
Hegel's Briefe, Nos. 1-16. 1887. 
Aesthetik. 3 vols. 

Geschichte der Philosophie (and E. Tr.) on Kant and Schelling. 

Introd. to the Aesthetic, translated by Hastie and by B. Bosanquet. 

Schopenhauer : Werke (German) vol. ii. Die Welt als Wille u. Vorstellung. 
Buck 3, Das Objekt der Kunst (E. Tr, Triibner, vol. i.). Lives of Schopen- 
hauer by Prof. W. Wallace (see also his article in Encycl Brit.) and by Mr. 
Belfort Bax. 

Herbart : Werke, 1, 2 and 8. 

Zimmermann : Aesthetik, vol. ii. Zzveiter Theil. Allegemeine Aesthetik als 
Eorm wissenschaft. 

Fechner : Vorschule d. Aesthetik. 

Edmund Gurney : "Power of Sound' 1 [this I do not know well] and 
essays entitled Tertium Quid. 1887. 

Helmholtz : Popular Lectures [E. Tr. 1880]. 

J. Ward : Articles " Psychology" and " Herbart " in Encycl. Brit. 
Solger's Vorlesungen iiber Aesthetik, publ. 1829 [given 1819]. 
Solger's Erwin (Dialogue) I have not seen. 
Vischer: Aesthetik, 2 vols. 1846-7. 
Die Kunst. 4 vols. 185 1-7. 

Kritische Gdnge, Nos. 5 and 6, including the Selbstkritik. 1866 and 1873. 
Rosenkranz: Aesthetik des Hdsslichen, pp. 451. 1853. 
Lotze : Grundziige d. Aesthetik (Diktate). 1884. 
Schasler: System d. Kiinste (a manual). 1885. 

Grundziige der Wissenschaft d. Schdnen u. der Kunst (a small 2 vol. work). 
1886. 

Carriere : Aesthetik, 2 vols. 1859. 

Hartmann : Zweiter sy sterna tischer Theil der Aesthetik. 1887. 800 pp. 
J. Sully : " Aesthetic," in Encycl. Brit. 
Ward : " Psychology," Ib. 

H. Spencer : Essays, Scientific, Political and Speculative (republished in 3 
vols. 1 891). 

Bain's Mental and Moral Science. 
Grant Allen : The Colour- sense. 1890. 
Collingwood's Philosophy of Orna?nent. 1884. 

Ruskin's works : for list and estimate see Collingwood, Buskin's Art- Teach- 
ing, 1892 ; note especially chapter On Nature of Gothic, in Stones of Venice 
and chapter On Penetrative Imagination in Modern Painters, vol. 2. 

K K 



49 8 



BIBLIOGRAPHY. 



Prof. Baldwin Brown : The Fine Arts (Murray's University Extension 
Series). 

Wm. Morris: Lectures on Art, 3rd edition, 1883; also the two lectures, 
v. and vi. On the History of Pattern-designing, and On the Lesser Arts, in the 
joint vol. of lectures by W. B. Richmond, Morris and others (Macmillan, 1882), 
entitled " Lectures on Art, delivered in support of the Society for the Pro- 
tection of Ancient Buildings." See too the essays prefatory to the Catalogues 
of the Arts a?id Crafts Exhibitions. 

Edward Caird : Essays on Literature and Philosophy. 1892. [Papers on 
Rousseau, Dante, Goethe and Wordsworth especially valuable. I regret 
that I had not the advantage of seeing these in time to profit by them.] 



INDEX TO HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



Abelard, 123 ; quoted, 144 n. 
Acanthus, Roman, 97 ; Byzantine, 
125. 

^Esthetic, true, among Greeks, 30 ; 
"Semblance" in Plato, 28; in 
Plotinus, 115; in Schiller, 292; 
and ethical criticism in Plato, 36 ff.: 
achievement of Plato, 54 ; and 
education, in Ar. 63 ; post-classical, 
99; origin of the name, 182; 
formal, criticized, 388. 

Allegory (see Symbolism), 93. 

Allen, Mr. Grant, 444 n. 

Apollo Belvedere, when found, 191. 

Aquinas, Thomas, 147. 

Architecture, modern, invented, 96 ; 
theoretical treatment by various 
writers compared, 352 ; Schopen- 
hauer on, 365. 

Aristotle, 17 ff. ; "Poetic" quoted, 
3 2 > 57, 64, 71 j what arts he 
treated of, 56 ; the pleasure of 
recognition, 58 ; poetry "scientific," 
59 : on Tragic Katharsis, 64 ff. 

Art, dist. Nature, 3 ; and Nature in 
Aristotle, 60. 

Arts, the lesser, in Plato, 38-9. 

Association, principle of, 384 ff. 

Athene, Winckelmann's favourite 
statue of, 245. 

Augustine, modernism of, 78 : on 
Beauty of Universe, 133. 

Baumgarten, 182. 

Beauty, in Nature and Art, 3 ; pecu- 
liar Greek view of, 17 ff.; formal 



and concrete, 40 ; formal attacked 
by Plotinus, 116; the love of in 
Plato, 53 ; natural, appreciated by 
early Christian writers, 128 ff. ; 
and expression in Lessing, 227 ; in 
Winckelmann, 249 ; natural in 
; Hegel, 337 ; of symmetry differ- 
ently treated, 373. 
I Bell, Sir C., On Expression, 444. 
Belvedere torso, when found, 191. 
Bernays, on tragic Katharsis, 64 ; his 

relation to Lessing, 235 ff. 
Browning, plot and character in, 74. 
Burke, 203 ; anticipates Lessing, 205. 
! Byzantine art, 97. 

I Carrey's drawings, 192. 
I Catullus, Carmen Nuptiale, 90 ; 
" Lesbia " poems, 90 ; Atys, 91. 
Character versus plot in Aristotle, 70. 
Characteristic, in Kant, 272: in 
Goethe and Hirt, 311 ff. : in Schel- 
lingj 328; in Schopenhauer, 368: 
in Zimmermann, 381 ; in Ruskin, 
448. 

Classification of the fine arts — Kant, 
280: Schelling, 330; Hegel, 345 
ff. and App. I.; Herbart, 371: 
Schasler, 419 ; Hartmann, 436. 
: Charlemagne, 139. 

Chrysippus, 99. 

Chrysostom, 129. 

Cicero, 100, 103. 

Colour, beauty of in Plato and Aris- 
totle, 34; History of this idea, 135. 
147 ; in Fechner, 3S5. 



5oo 



INDEX TO HISTORY OF AESTHETIC. 



Comedy, the New and Latin, 86-7 ; 

serious, 232 ; Hegel's view of, 360. 
Corneille, on the drama, 197. 

Dante, 152 ff. 
De Saussure, 216. 
Descartes, 176. 
Diderot, 253. 
Dio Chrysostom, 108. 
Diocletian's palace, 78. 
Dionysius the Areopagite, 140. 
Dirce group, when found, 191. 
Drama, is there any now? 212-13, 
219, 465. 

Dramaturgie, Lessing's, at whom 

directed, 215. 
Dualism, in Plato, less fatal than 

commonly supposed, 38 ; its ten- 

tency to Symbolism, 48. 

Economy, law of, 386. 
Epicurus, 83. 
Erigena (see Scotus). 

Fechner, on geometrical beauty, 41 ; 
account of, 381; experiments on 
golden section, 382 ; laws of associ- 
ation and economy, 384. 

Francis of Assisi, 144. 

Freedom, its relation to Greek art, 
244. 

Geometrical beauty, in Plato and 
Aristotle, 35 ; in Fechner, 41. 

Goethe, on beauty, 6 ; on " Kathar- 
sis," 65 ; on Gothic architecture, 
120 ; account of, 304; his relation 
to Kant, 311. 

Golden Section (see Fechner), 41. 

Gottsched, 201 ff. 

Gregory of Nyssa, 128. 

Gurney, Edmund, 388 ; (see 
Stumpf), 390 n. 

Hanslick, on music, 367. 

Hegel, on "Katharsis," 65; on 



Kant's Aesthetic, 265 ; cpd. with 

Schelling, 334. 
Herbart, account of, 369 ff. ; his 

limitation of Aesthetic, 371, 388. 
Hirt, on discoveries of antiquities, 

194. 

History of Art, Winckelmann's idea 
of, 242. 

Hogarth, reviewed by Lessing, 207 ; 

effect on Goethe, 208 ; alluded to 

by Reynolds, 209. 
Horace, protests against descriptions 

in poetry, 91. 
Hume, 178. 

Huxley, Prof. T. H., 258 n. 

Iconoclastic dispute, 138 ; cpd. with 

Plato's position, 139. 
Idealisation, in Ar., 59, 68, 75-6 ; 

two senses of, 341. 
Imitation, meaning of, stretched in 

Greek theory, 49, 60 ; inherent in 

man, 68 ; Ar.'s ultimate view of it, 

75 J in Hegel, 340. 

Jews, influence on iconoclastic dis- 
pute, 138. 
Justinian closed schools of Athens, 

78. 

Kaimes, Lord (Home), 203 ; antici- 
pates Lessing, 205-6. 

Kant, cpd. with Socrates, 45 ; with 
Erigena, 143; his "Observations," 
how related to Burke, 255; his 
theory of the sublime, how related 
to Burke, 275 ; on the "normal" 
idea compared with Reynolds, 271- 
2; idea of universal history, 284-5. 

Laocoon group, when found, 191 ; 
Lessing's, how occasioned, 215, 
221; account of, 221 ff. ; quoted, 
223 ; sources of its views, 225. 

Leibnitz, 177. 

Leo the Isaurian, 138. 



INDEX TO HISTORY OF /ESTHETIC. 



Lessing on " Katharsis," 64 ; com- 
pared with Corneille, 197 ; on 
French criticism, 201 ; account of, 
216 ff. ; " Dramaturgie " quoted, 
218 ; view of death, 230 ; on Aris- 
totle, 234; "Education of the 
Human Race," 252; significance 
of his death, 253. 

Longinus, 104. 

Lucretius, 83, 100. 

Lysippus, his statue of Kairos, 94. 

Mackail, Greek Anthology, 81 n. 
Mahaffy, quoted, 70, 164. 
Material, the feeling for, 348. 
Meleager, 79. 

Metaphysical Art-Criticism among 

Greeks, 23. 
Mill, J. S, 257. 

Modern or Gothic Art, creation of, 
126. 

Montfaucon, scepticism as to ancient 

sculptures, 191. 
Moralistic art-criticism among Greeks, 

Morris, William, quoted, 95 ff.; his 
critical views, 124 ff., 454 ff. 

Music, in Philodemus, 101 ; liturgical, 
in early Christian times, 127; en- 
lightened views of, in Plato and 
Ar., 148; in Schelling, 322; in 
Schopenhauer, 367 (see App. II.). 

Nature, dist. Art, 3. 

Naturalism and Christianity, 128 ff. 

Niobe Group, when found, 191. 

Painting, early Christian, 127 ff. ; 

Dutch defended by Hegel, 343. 
Parthenon and Elgin Marbles, 193-4 ; 

reception of E.M. in England, 

442. 

Pater, Mr. Walter, Renaissance, 122; 

Marius, 126. 
Pattison, Rev. Mark, 188. 
Philodemus, 100. 



Philology, Wolf's conception of, 189. 
'Philostratus, 109. 
Pictorial Poetry in Germany, 214. 
Plato, 17 ff. ; Republic quoted, 23 ff. ; 

Philebus, 32 ff. ; Phgedo, 48 ; Gor- 

gias, 51. 
Pleasure, aesthetic, 7. 
Plot, in Ar., 70. 

Plotinus, in ; and Socrates, 117. 
Plutarch, 106 ff. 
Portraits, in Plotinus, 114. 
Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, 121. 
Prometheus, of ^Eschylus, plot and 

character in, 74. 
Purity, of colour and tone in Plato, 

34 ; in Kant, 269 ; in Hegel, 339. 

Renaissance, Latin character of, 191. 

Reynolds in Idler, 209 ; alludes to 
Hogarth, ib. ; effect of later science 
on his idea of species, 210. 

Rosenkranz, 400. 

Rousseau, pioneer work of, 215. 

Rules of the Drama, Lessing on, 219. 

Ruskin and Vergil, historical senti- 
ment in landscape, 93 n. ; on 
Schiller, 291 11. \ on Sacrifice, 387 
n. ; importance of his views, 453. 

St. Peter's at Rome, 125, 163. 

St. Sophia at Constantinople, 78, 124. 

Scaliger, 188. 

Schasler criticized, 166 ff, 246. 

Schelling on Homer, 1 2 ; account of, 
317 ff. ; the absolute standpoint, 
321; on Christianity, 324; on 
Dante, 325 ; cpd. w. Schopen- 
hauer, 368. 

Schiller, on Shakespeare's naturalism, 
299; verses suggested by Lessing, 
230, 238 n. ;> "Rauber," 253 ; ac- 
count of, 288 ff. ; play-theory, 294 ; 
relation to Goethe, 297. 

Schlegel, definition of beauty, 6, 300 ; 
influence on Schopenhauer, 364. 

Scholasticism, 140. 



/ 



502 



/ 



INDEX TO HISTORY OF ESTHETIC. 



Schopenhauer, 363. 

Scotus Erigena, 131, 140. 

Shaftesbury, 177. 

Shakespeare, 152 ff. 

Sidney, Sir Philip, quoted, 154 n. 

Socrates, in Xenophon, on art, 44. 

Solger, 394 ff. 

Song-music, simple, in Plato, 36. 
Soul, beautiful, in Plato, 37. 
Spalato, palace at, 78, 97. 
Species, doctrine of and idea, of 

"characteristic," 210. 
Spencer, Mr. H., the play theory, 294; 

law of Economy, 386 ; on musical 

expression, 441. 
Spinoza, 176. 
Spon and Wheler, 192. 
Strato, 82. 

Stumpf, Professor, on music, 387. 
Symbolism, in Greek theory, 48-9, 

60 ; its nature, dist. allegory, 93, 

127, 139, 143, 158, 253. 
Sublime (see Longinus, Burke, Kant), 

104 ; in Winckelmann, 242. 
Succession of the arts in history, 350, 

387- 

" Swiss " critics, 214. 

Symmetry, criticized by Plotinus, 

117 ; the "colour and symmetry" 

tradition, 135, 147. 

Technical terms, growth of, in Greco- 
Roman times, 83. 
Theocritus, 88. 

Theology, Christian, its relation to 
Republic and Timaeus, 47-8. 



Theophrastus, 82. 

Tones, beauty of, in Plato and Aris- 
totle, 34. 

Tragedy, origin of middle class, 232. 
Tragic "Katharsis " in Ar. developed 
by Lessing and Bernays, 234 ff. 

Ugly in Aristotle, 57 ; in Plutarch, 
107-8 ; in Plotinus, 115 ; in Burke, 
203-4 ; in Lessing, 225 ; in Schle- 
gel, 301 ; in Hegel, 338 and 355 ; 
in Solger, Rosenkranz, etc., 395 ff. 

Unities, dramatic, 201. 

Vergil's naturalism, 91 ; historical 

sentiment, 93. 
Vischer, 399. 

Voltaire on the unities, 201. 

Ward, Dr. J., on Economy of Atten- 
tion, 380. 

Weber brothers, on law of Economy, 
386. 

Weisse, 395. 

Wieland, 214. 

Winckelmann and the Herculanean 
discoveries, 193 ; desires excavation 
at Pisa, 194; account of, 239 ff. ; 
compared with Bacon, 240 ; not an 
abstract idealist, 245 ; on modern 
painting, 246. 

Wolf, F. A., 189. 

Wolff, 183. 

Zimmermann, account of, 373 ; eco- 
nomy of attention, 380. 
Zoilus, 102. 



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